Calypso Ognjen Spahić trans. Rachael Daum
He swayed along with the pines, cypresses, and great vineyards that stretched out to the lake. Cupressus sempervirens and Pinus halepensis, scattered through the stones: entrenched with red dust and wild bags that the north wind sometimes breathed life into. He swayed under the February moonlight, with the thick, cold power lines, with kilowatts of electricity that traveled through unknown and incinerated lands. He swayed with the dead magpies hanging from the wires. Left, right, with the whole landscape, with the nearby road and the white mountaintops. The dead body gently released its water. A warm stream trickled down the left thigh and soaked the yellowing plants. The eyes had become clouded and dry. The spine was curved, and the legs were bent at the knee, so that with a little imagination it was possible to imagine that from that rope, that from that dry branch, swayed a big question mark and not a man. The truck tire he had balanced on before his death slowly rolled back toward the wreck. Cats slept there. During the day they crouched at the top of the heap of rusted metal and fixedly watched the electrified birds. After hours of waiting, it would happen that one of the dead animals would fall. The quickest creature would chomp the meager bones, and then flee the plain, into the vineyards. The rope that Martin Dedijer hung from was sturdy and new. Twelve coils and the ragged hemp hair formed a serpent as thick as a forefinger. He’d laid the bundle on the passenger seat and looked at it a few minutes. He knew a lot more work was ahead of him. It’d make a noose, the rope shorted to the proper length, and the big knot soaked in engine oil. It was necessary to grease the thick threads, eliminate friction and the chance that the clear intention get sabotaged with negligence. His hands were sweaty. One end of the rope went up and wriggled like an angry snake. The closeness of death destroys memory and devours insignificant details. The one thing that remains at the end appears as a chaotic collage whose clippings hang stripped of emotion or logical meaning. But then, he thought, comes the question: who separates the important from the unimportant? He changed from second to third gear and pressed harder on the gas, thinking of the thoughts going then through his skull as clever thoughts, worth writing down. Too late for that, he thought and put on the brakes, slowing down at a big intersection. Large drops of sweat dripped down his forehead. They rolled down to his eyebrows, and then continued down the edge of his face, all the way down to his neck and loose flaps of skin. They stung there. Like insect bites: little Chinese scavenger ants, like the invisible larvae of Mexican copper flies. He wasn’t sure if those insects even existed. But if they do exist, he thought, their bites would feel like this. The dirty heat of the dusty seats mixed with the smell of
gas. He breathed shallowly, trying not to breathe in the drops of sweat that were sliding down to the tip of his nose. With his thumb he wiped the deepest groove on his neck, slowly, from one side to the other, and then licked the tip of his finger with the taste of copper, maybe bronze. He touched his neck and hoped that the rope would do the job. He turned left, to the south. Once more he’d see the pines beside the highway and try, from his car, to spot the most powerful, most beautiful point emerging from the center of the forest, from which his body would swing. February was a good month for the job. The dogs disappear, snouts high in the air detecting unknown and dominating smells. Their barks get quieter and more subdued as the cats leave their shelters. Their fur changes colors. Their green pupils dilate. The old photons of dead stars reflect in them. Their little snouts are hot and dry, their teeth sharp. Their claws seek out fresh blood. He was scared of cats. He’d visited his tree a few weeks before. He’d stood by the hawthorn bush and looked from a distance. He smoked four cigarettes looking at the correct, beautifully branchy crown. The sun went down behind the crooked silver silos. A strange wind sneaked through the branches. The wrecked truck resembled a dead rhinoceros. Two cats slept under the tree. When the sun went down, they started to stretch their claws. He tossed the cigarette butt. They raised their emaciated heads like sphinxes. More cats arrived. A green lizard caught in little jaws surrendered to death. The tail unfurled, sensing the change. As he lit his fourth cigarette, he noticed that the shadows had disappeared. That’s the moment night begins. The flame from his lighter attracted the animals’ attention. All the silver eyes looked in his direction. He didn’t want cats under his tree. They were looking at him, he thought, like a phantom, insignificant, quiet, ignorant of the secrets that happen in the night, unfathomable and close. He shoved a stone in the direction of the pack hoping that the furry specters would run off or maybe disappear. But only a burly, three-legged specimen slipped slowly off into the dried brush. Fights started. Bloody muzzles and broken teeth, frantic jumps and false courtships, glowing eyes and glances murky with primordial urges. It all led to an orgy-like mating, filled with biting yowls in which long-dead, tortured people could be heard. Cat seed would spill onto the sour earth. The males would break their canines on the skulls of the fertile females. The forgotten brood would be wolfed down by the dogs. The night before, he had dreamed about his mother. She’d held a fat white cat with a rope around its neck in her lap. While he drove through the pines, the dream came to him. On waking, a few sentences Marija had repeated in a hoarse voice reverberated in his head, but he couldn’t remember the words. If he was lucky, he’d remember the smell of pines awoken by the winter sun. He turned on the radio. He pressed the red button. The
speakers released noise intersected with a distant melody. An unfinished road cut through the suburban wasteland. The asphalt butted up against vineyards and sparse forest. Abandoned residential quarters rose up on the other side of the road. White dots, seagulls, gathered high above the canopy. Lawless flocks, vanguards of the north wind. He hoped it wouldn’t be too cold when he did what he needed to do. Frozen hands, he thought, wouldn’t do the job well. He also knew the seagulls were no mistake. His mother had seen them as evil birds and feared the north wind. When her depressive contemplation would get ruined by the barely-audible creaking of the window frame, she’d jump from the armchair and go onto the terrace to check what was going on. Her pupils nervously searched the skies and if they spotted even one feathered rat, she’d go back into the apartment, panicked. She’d pull a robe over her shabby nightgown and rush off to save her lemons. She watered three saplings in big plastic pots following a schedule adapted to the seasons of the year. She carefully pruned the overgrown branches and took care that the fruits were not hidden in the leaves. Taking a lemon from the little orchard was a punishable offense. Martin had done it only once, as a child. He had wanted a big fruit that had hung on a lonely branch: he warmed it in his palms and smelled the line of life, imagining the intoxicating sourness in his thirsty throat. Actually, he wasn’t sure then whether he’d delicately cut it away or whether the lemon had nestled on its own into his outreached palm. When she appeared, breathless, on the steep stairs, she froze in the doorway. The scent of fruit danced among the objects. She sniffed the air like a dog and rushed to the balcony to count the lemons. She counted them twice, softly touching the ripe fruits. He sat in his room and waited. He hoped she wouldn’t notice. He had done everything with the same precision as covering up a murder. He’d cleaned the glass twice that he’d drunk the pure lemon juice from. He hoped that the extra detergent would get rid of the traces. He’d cut up the remains and thrown them down the toilet. Everything had disappeared but the strong molecules of the scent of lemon juice which had stubbornly levitated, waiting for his mother to breathe them in. When he left his room after half an hour, she was waiting for him on her armchair, nervously sucking her cigarette. She pointed to the little wooden chair and he sat. There are some things you have to earn. Do you understand? He nodded, trying to avoid her sharp look. Your father would be disappointed if he knew what you’ve done. She tapped the ashes into her left palm and stroked the little heap with her thumb. You ruin the things that are important to me. You’re ruining my life. She set the cigarette on the edge of the ashtray so it burned up to the filter. She rubbed the ashes between her palms. A few flakes lazily floated to the ground. See my hands? Do you see them? On the carpet lay four
fruits cut in half and squeezed to the last drop: eight yellow halves. Enough juice for a big crystal glass, one of six that only left the kitchen on special occasions. Look at my hands. These hands care for and feed you. Do you understand that? Marija’s palms were yellow and ashy. Take it. Drink every last drop. She pointed with her forefinger at the glass standing in the middle of the table. After the first lemon he’d squeezed with sweating hands, he already felt an upset in his stomach. A few spoonfuls of the sour juice had been enough to satisfy his wish and curiosity. What awaited him, his mother’s ugly goblet rubbed with ash, would pollute his belly with an excess that would erode it and that he would feel for a long time after. Take it, she repeated and in a slow half-circle stretched out her palm, as though some exotic delicacies were laid out before him. His forehead was soaked in cold. Yellow lemony claws went down his back and scratched his skin. Through the glass of the big balcony windows he could see seagulls. A big flock gathered in a small part of the sky as though a miracle was hidden away right in that spot: a secret invisible to the human eye. The north wind would begin to blow in the evening. It would blow quiet and high, in the tops of the evergreen canopy, and then more and more powerful, lower and lower. Warm air would rush to the south. The lemons will freeze, he thought. They’ll be turned into ice sculptures that’ll melt with the sun’s first rays into moldy mush. Empty pots will await his mother. She’ll touch the dead soil the yellow maggots lie in. She’ll cry over that soil and look up into the north wind. She’ll see the seagulls. He swallowed quickly, clutching the glass with both hands. He hoped he’d throw up unexpectedly, that it’d pour over the woolen carpet and Marija’s bare feet sprouting brown, twisted nails. Juuuust like that… All of it… All of it… The whole thing… Every last drop. There are some things you have to learn. You chose the hard way yourself. He stopped halfway through, but not to beg for mercy, but to laugh. He said Thank you, mother, and started to drink with open eyes, in big gulps. He looked at Marija’s face flooded with rage, unsatisfied with the punishment her son was bearing as though it were a blessing. He tried to cover up his nausea, so he voraciously tipped up the glass, not wanting to miss the pits at the bottom. Done! he said, breathless, and turned over the glass. He waited for the last drops to fall into the middle of his palm. It smelled like the traces of the liquid. He said, Mother, seagulls, pointing to the sky. She closed her eyes and picked up the remains of the lemons. She chucked them at random, kicked and screamed while he quietly sat on the little wooden chair, overwhelmed with sourness. His stomach churned and rolled, attacked by a billion sour crystals. When she calmed down, he got up and went to his room, leaving space for the giant octopus of depression and unhappiness that she pulled always and everywhere with her. He writhed under his
pillow hoping that the woman would finally slash her veins, shear the lemon tree, cut her overgrown nails, or, best of all, do all three. He listened to her grumbling and the thumping of her slippers. She whirred from one room to the other, rearranging little aging things and knick-knacks. She lit cigarette after cigarette. The butts burnt out on the marble slabs of the kitchen table, on the television or the toilet. Those objects, ever since he could remember them, were covered in yellow burns. Whenever he got back from school, as he approached the corner of the building next door that he could see the terrace, window, and lemons from, his heart beat faster. Long red flames licking through the molten glass and his mother burning together with the lemons: it was the picture he’d imagined many times and was frightened of. He believed that one day, a load of curious onlookers and some fire trucks would be waiting for him past that corner. That was why he’d decided that he’d hang in the forest at the edge of town, far from occasional onlookers. He imagined that he’d feel peace and solitude there, a different sort of solitude hidden in the trees. His body would be found, he thought, after a few days. The coroner would rule a suicide by hanging and his death would, he hoped, sink into the statistical abyss in the dusty archives with wax stamps. The faded and half-abandoned high rises on the other side of the road were far enough away. The yellow lights in the cold bedrooms would go off before midnight. Closed off between walls drenched with moisture, people who never look out their window slept in those rooms. The metalwork is decaying, like their bones. The façade is stained with great flecks which ooze brown phlegm. Mammoth ulcers that radiate decay. He imagined the chill of the dark staircase flooded with the smell of apartments. Every family, with its combination of hormones, illnesses, and degree of personal household hygiene, secretes its own special scent. Every family, he thought, secretes a smell proportionally repugnant to its amount of unhappiness. In his mother’s room it had smelled of rotting apples. He’d go there seldom and in secret as a child, when she’d leave the apartment. He’d wait half an hour or longer, fearing a surprise return. He’d gather his courage a few minutes more, looking at the black scratched door. He’d take a deep breath and sneak up on tiptoe, gently grasping the squeaky handle. He’d slip in his arm to the elbow to turn the light on, and then go in, listening to the beating in his own chest. For years afterwards he couldn’t explain with certainty what he’d been afraid of in that den. He had to remember the way the strewn-about things had been arranged. He was afraid that his mother would notice even the smallest change. In order to open the drawer at the base of the headboard, he had to remove layers of underwear, newspapers, and books. He memorized the stains and tears around the things on the bed, so he could put them back into the same order later. He
remembered the contents of the drawer well, but there was always something new that would interest him. In with the cups with thick black sediment inside, in with the pieces of food covered in blue scum, one morning he found a little silver case with a lock of black hair. He sniffed it instinctively. He looked at the photograph of his father over the headboard. He breathed deep, believing that he was breathing in the scent of the dead man. With the tips of his fingers he touched the hairy foundation of missing memories and lay sprawled out onto the bed, overwhelmed with new emotions. His great father, hater of lemons trees, silent sage with the high brow. Knower of the dark secrets of the human soul and cruel tamer of Marija, his mother. Killer of loneliness, enemy of fear, executioner of yellow nails, and knight, non-smoker. He fell asleep with the lock in his fingers, forgetting that the door of the apartment needed to be locked from the inside. The smell of rotting apples slithered up his body, triggering dreams where the ocean was beating rocky crags, from which grew thick black hair. He stood at the edge of the cliff, trying to disentangle his feet caught in the wet tresses. Out at sea bobbed a few boats. But only one was important and waved in his direction. He dreamed and kicked his legs in the synthetic algae of Marija Dedijer’s bras and dirty shirts. He swam in the dried-up tears, among the sweaty irregularly-shaped stains that were deposited there, fermenting the smell of his childhood. He was awoken by footsteps and the bang of the front door. Fear pinned him to the bed. He put the lock of hair back into the case and pushed it under the pillow. He expected a stampede of hysterical screaming, cursing, and awful oaths, but when she came to the door she looked at him for a moment, and then started to undress. Her eyelids were underlined with big black circles, after a moment he wanted to ask her: what happened? He stood with his back pressed against the cold wall realizing once again that was just his mother that had happened. She threw her shoes aside and let her dress slip to the floor. Her underwear hung from her body like melted cheese. She gently cleared things and, groaning quietly, laid her head on the pillow. She lay shriveled up on her side, her hands clamped against her chest. He wanted to disappear as quickly as possible, but he was scared that any movement might burst the thin membrane they were floating in. He breathed lightly, trying to breathe in the smells awoken by the warm body as little as possible. She pulled her lumpy feet into the heap at the food of the bed and turned to him. Between her eyelids he saw a bleary gleam, heavy tears that like insects crept down her cheeks. Come and get warm, she said, and stretched out a limp hand. Motionlessly he stood pressed against the wall knowing that there, on the bed, on the sheets weighted with the pale body, was even colder: that in the smell of rotten apples it was unbearably cold. He went out with his face
turned to the bed. He was scared to turn his back because he thought that the woman could transform in a second into something else, something unfamiliar and utterly terrible. He left the door ajar. He hung a tin ashtray on the doorknob to warn him in case his mother decided to leave the room. He fell asleep on the armchair, his palms pressed against the armrests. He’d sat there to relax, looking at the dried flowers on the shelf across from him, but his eyelids sank, heavy with images. His head sank onto his chest, the muscles in his face relaxed and after just a few minutes he was breathing evenly and deeply: sleeping, he and his mother, in a rare moment of forced serenity, exhausted from mistaken emotions, emptied, pale and bound in the heavy shackles they pulled behind them wherever they went, wherever they slept. He didn’t feel the darkness that fell across the objects. Darkness sneaked in through the dusty windows and the tops of the lemon trees. Cold stole through the warped window panes, under the balcony door, through the invisible cracks in the walls. It wandered around his feet, between his toes, and he woke up thinking that he’d already been sleeping seven thousand years in the same spot. His first thought would always be of his mother. It was important to know where the woman was, how near and what she had in her hands. With these facts he could adjust his future movements, actions, and words. He looked down the hallway. The ashtray was still hanging in the same spot. The clanging sound of metal carried from behind the door. He stood in the hallway, trying to guess the origin of the sound, but couldn’t manage for the fear that followed him step by step as he approached the open door, behind which hissed the monster, Marija Dedijer, the Gorgon, the mother of all mothers, and his mother. She gnashes her metal teeth and big sharp molars. Her eyes are glass, her nails are steel, rusted, thin, and venomous. She was sitting at the edge of the bed, head bent gently towards the floor. It seemed to him that she was staring at her own feet. He couldn’t see her face because of her hair. And her hands were hidden under the thick, greasy ropes of hair. The lamp at the end of the headboard cast a yellow light, so that the figure of his father Maksim on the wall seemed different. Metal sounds rang out from under Marija’s hair. When he saw the legs of the big scissors that protruded through her black locks, he noticed that the bed was covered in curly tresses, shiny, dirty, and heavy. She saw his feet and uncovered her face. He took the same position, pressed against the cold wall, and waited for words, any words, that would turn horror into reality, make the reality seem bearably horrible, move away from the demonic fantasy that silence brings. You wanted memories? she said, and cut away a few more strands of hair. Here… Look… As many memories as you want. The box he’d hidden under the pillow was open and empty. The traces of his father were lost in the heap of his mother’s
hair. She threw the scissors to the side and lay in the nest of hair. He looked at the big blisters on her feet and the blue outlines of her veins that ended over her knees. The show was over. The serving of fear, madness, and impurity was consumed without much backwash, so he could leave the room in peace, sure that the evening would proceed in silence. He didn’t think about that metal case anymore. Because the days and their length were determined by short-lived emotions that spilled out in one moment and disappeared the next. It seemed to him that there was nothing lasting in him. Even in his earliest childhood he was surprised at the tide of apathy that would always completely wash over him soon after the bizarre circus acts characteristic of Marija Dedijer. It was the only way their life together was possible. The sediment collected at the bottom, hidden from the everyday torrents he’d learned to fight with. Martin felt something of these shifts even while he was sitting in the car, windows open, parked on the sidewalk, with five meters of rope on the passenger seat, and looked at the woods. The road pointed true north. Like a long runway for the wind to land on, he thought. Fireflies of little fires trembled high in the hills. Wild goats roamed in the crags, gulping ash. His childhood days were spent in the house of his half-blind aunt on his father’s side, Natalija, where his grandfather Todo had been born, where his father had grown up, and from whose walls barren fig trees grew. Martin could unmistakably sense a trip to the village by Marija’s incomprehensibly good mood. Days before the trip, her intended attacks of insanity halted and she tried to approach a parental stereotype. She’d arrange the kitchen table hours before lunch. She did her best to set the silverware, plates, and important crystal glasses following a geometric pattern only clear to her. The smell of burnt meat and spices she overdid it with came from the kitchen. Waiting for lunch, he listened to the little pepper grinder and the gears grinding the little black spheres, killing the last traces of taste. Marija’s cognition was placated when it had something to repeat, and to repeat something that had meaning. They chewed the meat slowly, gulping the stringy spheres in unpleasant bites, in absolute silence. After lunch she went into the room and took Martin’s things from the wardrobe she needed to get ready for the trip. She’d open two big black suitcases on the floor and arrange everything in them that reminded her in that moment of her son. She jammed in winter and summer clothes together without order, along with clothes hangers, books, and broken toys. She snatched up blunt pencils, and socks and hats he’d worn when he was a baby. The preparations seemed more like erasing traces than a caring gesture. With her fists she bunched up the layers from the wardrobe, trying to do up the metal straps. When she finished, she’d push the heavy, engorged suitcases into the hallway to the front door. See? I packed everything for
you. Everything’s here. I don’t want you to miss anything. Aren’t you going to enjoy the fresh air? Aren’t you? He nodded, knowing that there really was everything in those suitcases, and that until the day he left, he’d have to wear the same clothes. The things he enjoyed, his plastic guns, some cars, and brass figures of soldiers on horses, were lurking under crumpled layers of clothes. He had the feeling that his whole life would move from one place to another, and he accepted it as an inevitability that was an integral part of life with his mother. A jolly cousin from the village would arrive around noon. At the door he’d drink two or three glasses of water, and then without much strain he’d take both suitcases, hurrying down to the ground floor. I know you’ll be good. I know I don’t even have to tell you that. Anyway, Natalija is a wonderful woman. She knows… and you know… She tried to convey her emotions in unfinished sentences. The tortured silence that took place in undefined tension in her vocal chords came off like a legless cat trying to jump up. As she was stammering, he’d look directly into her eyes wishing he could help or at least make the situation more unpleasant. The obligatory kiss on the forehead followed, some money in the pocket of his shirt, and a farewell that, they both knew, wouldn’t change anything. Because two weeks later the same cousin would pull the suitcases back up to the third floor, along with a carton of goat cheese. He’d wipe his sweat and drink his water. She’d say, Hello! Look how you’ve grown! And I… I don’t know… My child… Well… and again a kiss on the forehead. Martin wouldn’t say anything. He’d breathe through his mouth as long as he could stand to, and then after a few minutes he’d unconsciously breathe through his nose, taking in the familiar smells that would immediately brace him for everything that awaited him, everything that he couldn’t forget. She’d once again prepare a holiday lunch, asking him about his experiences in the village, which he always made up to placate her. He talked about made-up children, describing their hard lives burdened with physical labor. He made up unhappy stories of small hands covered in calluses, of getting up at four in the morning and cruel fathers yelling late into the night. He talked about their natural generosity and hospitality, explaining how they kindly accepted him though he was a child from the city. He thought up funerals and village festivities that Natalija took him to, always saying that it’d be wonderful if next year he could stay just one more day. In actuality, the only child in the village was the deformed Sara whose cries went through hollow stone walls and scared the cats. The houses whistled empty, and when Natalija would say that they were abandoned to the tooth of time, he imagined a rotten molar the size of a fridge that fell from a stormy sky and smashed through the abandoned roofs. He shared the room with two iron beds and a big wooden trunk under the window
with Natalija. After Maksim’s death she’d wanted to accentuate her grief, throwing away many possessions and the amenity of television. The old box with its dusty screen squatted in a corner and served as a spot to stack dishes. She only wore black clothes, she blew her big nose with black handkerchiefs; the glasses with the hard red plastic frames were the only exception. Black underwear dried on the clothesline behind the house. Huge dresses like parachutes, bras, and panties swung in the warm wind, spreading the smell of soap. The meadow behind the house enclosed by a rough stone wall, brambles, wire, and ivy that had sucked the last drop of life from the gnarled vines, Natalija called her vineyard. Her father had planted the dying plants, which were just one more reason for the hunched woman to recall an indefinable loss. Martin couldn’t recall the words she’d said while she’d torment her body with pointless housework. As she pushed and pulled over the wooden floor, lifting and cleaning irreversibly dirty objects and furniture, she often recalled Maksim’s last arrival. It was years later, before Martin Dedijer, that the glowing, yellow pictures arrived of a hot summer’s day that Natalija spoke of in superlatives. In the center stood the silhouette of a tanned man’s bare, sweaty back, who opened up black holes in the earth with a threepronged pitchfork. He’d come off the boat, said he was getting married, that his future wife was expecting, that he’d plant a vineyard there and in seven days sail off on his last voyage. He said that his new wife was called Marija. He put the saplings at the base of the stairs in front of the house. He poured a handful of water and a fistful of dirt onto the young roots. Natalija silently took in the information, hiding her tears. She hurried to the kitchen and took the big sewing scissors from the drawer, stopping to wipe the portrait of her brother Todo and and his wife Jelica with her sleeve. Maksim Dedijer was smoking on the stairs when he felt cold steel behind his ear and thought of the blue he was staring into, grasping the railing on the deck. The metal rang, and between her thumb and forefinger Natalija clutched a lock of his black hair. Before he could ask anything, she rapidly stepped back and was lost again in the half-darkness of the house. With a thin hand she groped under the comforter until she found the silver case. She wrapped up the lock and returned it to rest in the same place. She brought out a bottle of rakija and two glasses. Pour some. To toast with, she said, trying to steady her gnarled fingers. After she poured the liquid down her throat, with a few clumsy sentences she expressed her joy with the fact that between these old walls there would soon be crying: To the new Dedijer. She squinted up at the sky, shedding tears, and then smashed the glass on the stone threshold and asked Maksim to do the same. He hesitated a few seconds, and then whirled the polished glass at the door. He expected to hear the sound of shattering, but the glass
didn’t break. Natalija rumpled her forehead hard and pursed her lips. She pushed her hand into her deep pocket and grasped a small hunk of red yarn. That the glass didn’t shatter into pieces she interpreted as a bad omen, unmistakably predicting the future. Because Martin Dedijer never cried in that house. When he was brought to Natalija’s the first time, he was six years old and he cried behind the house, by the big hackberry tree the two goats were tied to. He cleaned his wet face with his palms, believing that he would spend the rest of his life there and that his mother packing the suitcase had left him to the mercy of the woman wrapped in black rags who, looking at him at the base of the stone steps, had knelt and cried, conjuring his dead father. Except for his father’s aunt Natalija, the names of the Dedijer ancestors had rotted with their bodies, and the only name in the village that showed any hint of humanity was Sara. From the window of the bedroom, peeping from behind the curtains, Martin saw the metal shutters on the wall of the neighbors’ house and listened to the range of unintelligible voices occasionally interrupted by bloodcurdling screams. He ventured closer only once. While Natalija was napping on the wooden bench in front of the stove, he sprang into the glowing silence of the summer afternoon, and leaping over the broken stone walls of the abandoned courtyards he came to the big dirty wall. He sat under the window and tried to slow his breathing. He felt the unbearable heat of the sun baking straight down onto the rubble he was leaning on. He looked up and for the first time saw up close the window he’d seen from afar. The distance between the metal slats was much larger than he’d imagined. Large enough, he thought, that a pale boney hand with long fingers could slip through and grab him by the throat. So he crouched even lower and, shading his eyes with his palm, he kept looking into the dark space. The black cold, against the heat and sweaty itch that was tickling his back, seemed very attractive. He felt very thirsty imaging that, from the secret room, instead of the smell of stagnant moisture and goat cheese, there flowed a stream of quick cold water cascading down the slats of the shutters. And then there was stirring in the darkness, barely perceptible movement of cold air, then fingers, four fingers, a long red tongue, and fear that bisected his insides. Sara licked the red-hot metal, her tongue darting in several directions. Her fingers moved without order, like the legs of a dead spider seeking their final rest. In his mouth he felt the sour taste of rust. The atrophied creature that, as far as he was concerned, had no problem clambering up the walls, hung upside down and looked at the world with eyes that were all black pupil and no whites: it said his name. He heard slow voices, six clear and sharp letters, which arranged themselves in a logical sequence somewhere on the border between light and dark, balancing on the tin blades of hot metal. He pressed his back harder against
the wall and shut his eyes filled with sun. Fear turned into a mass that surged between his ribs, above his stomach. He had the feeling that something in him was spreading, that a tree was growing and stretching twisted branches reaching the most hidden arteries, the most sensitive crannies of his seething bowels. He opened his eyes but couldn’t budge. His feet were planted in place, and his sweaty palms were stuck to his bare knees. Natalija Dedijer was standing on the stairs of the house he was staying in. Her face moved, deformed with the heat of the glowing stone bricks. She waved nervously, as though she was breaking pieces of air with her twitching fingers. Her eternally pursed thin lips opened, calling him back in a panic. It was clear to him that he was in the wrong place. From the window came a nervous clicking of teeth that quickened and turned first into a muffled groaning, and then into a gutting shriek that lifted him from the ground and made him run jumping over the bundles of withered brambles. When he made it to the stairs, he stood, wiping the sweat from his forehead and eyebrows. Natalija pursed her lips again, shook her head and said: It’s not allowed to go there. You’re not allowed to go there. Don’t forget. She stopped looking in his direction as though she’d given the rest of the unfinished explanation with that look. Martin had thought that she’d react differently, that she would fuss because of his dirty shirt and the scratches. They she’d gently take him inside, and on the way, next to his ear, say: Please, forget Sara. It’s a sad misfortune. He drank cold water, and then they ate lunch in silence: the two of them, along with the name that started with S, that like wisps of smoke crept among the things. Never again did he go to the window, as though he would never free himself from Sara’s voice saying his name. As he sat in the car with the rope in the passenger seat, he tried to call up other details that would refresh his memory. He tried to figure out how he’d learned her name and he was certain that it wasn’t Natalija’s lips that had told him first. He didn’t trust his own senses, especially not when he stayed in the apartment with Marija. His mother, gathered in the glow of cigarettes, the always tense silence that was sometimes filled with absent-minded monologues: that was the atmosphere he sometimes got lost in, wishing to hear what wasn’t there, wishing to see things and people that weren’t there, and that would never be there. So he wasn’t sure that it hadn’t been from his mother’s lips, during one of those usual summer trips to the village, as she’d waited for him in front of the door with the two black suitcases and the sweaty cousin, the forbidden name that started with S alighted, and ended up among the whirlpools of misfortune, betrayal, and suffering. Martin had run off to the kitchen to fill the two big glasses whose contents would go down the driver’s throat. He had to wait to pour the water because his mother always checked that the water was cold enough. In
the summer months, that had been her magnanimous sign of hospitality. Martin held his forefinger under the trickling stream waiting for the rest of the tepid water to pass and for the cooler water to appear, which he believed came from big caves dug under the city. Marija and the short-necked being were talking, leaning on the suitcases. He filled the cups and the glass fogged up. As he went step by step, balancing the too-full glasses, swarms of whispered sentences reached him, stretched out between the walls. He recalled Marija’s questioning tone, two or three sharp words that ended in the name Sara, and then, the concerned, thin voice of the thirsty cousin and whose uncomfortable nodding he caught when he appeared with the glasses at the door. Together they turned their heads, assumed artificial smiles and interrupted the conversation whose meanings scattered like frightened rodents. The man took the glass and the water disappeared in a few voracious gulps. He complained for a bit about his high blood pressure and the pain in his back, and then took the second glass. His fat, dark fingers were shaking. As he brought the chilled glass to his lips, he looked at Marija and said, There’s nothing else to say. Don’t worry, and then continued to drink. Martin brought the cups back, hung back for a bit in the hallway waiting for the rest of the conversation, but the show was over. They were silent as he returned from the kitchen, each looking off to the side. Marija was scared of the questions she recognized in Martin’s eyes. That’s why she, counting money, added a few bills more than was usual and pushed the papers into the pocket of his shirt. Martin did up the little green button and thanked her. He knew that the money would disappear during the first night he stayed in Natalija’s house. He’d stretch the shirt across the back of the chair by the headboard, and when Natalija thought he was fast asleep, she’d sneak up to the bed and undo the green button, trying not to make the faintest noise with her movements. She’d clench the money tight in her thin fist and go under the kitchen light bulb to count it. The next day she tried to justify the act to herself. She said that funerals had become inexplicably expensive and she was just asking for help to cover the price of a decent coffin, which wasn’t low. At lunch she detailed the way she wished to leave this world, always voicing that all this come to mind if she’d have the good fortune to drop dead suddenly. A serious illness that would tie her to her bed and require long-term treatment would drain her funeral funds, so that in that case, she said, they could bury her in a cardboard box. Martin never mentioned the money she took. In some way it was clear to him that it was rent for his stay in the village house. Though he never doubted Natalija’s emotions, he knew that for this woman he was just a rough mold of his father, a living souvenir which was expected to fulfill the purpose of existing, conforming to the burden of grief and memory of the life and death of Maksim Dedijer
whose bones rolled at the bottom of the Black Sea. That morning long ago, before Maksim Dedijer would appear to dig thirty holes in the dry ground, before he’d strip bare and wash his body in cold water after the job was done, waiting for Natalija on the threshold of the house was a one-eyed cat. She tried to send it away with a wave of her hand, but the animal just sneered at her, firm in where it sat. The world is full of bad omens, she thought, and saw the cat on the threshold of the house as a portent for her own life in which unhappiness had been a regular guest. Then a few hours later, Maksim Dedijer would walk through the gate and give her his big news, and then the little crystal glass he’d thrown aiming at the threshold of the house hadn’t broken into pieces: they, Natalija thought, had been the heralds of some much darker clouds that would, with their gloom and girth, darken much more than her life. And the shadow on her right lung that would light up for years on the X-ray was just one of the piers of despair from which Natalija Dedijer would depart this world in suffering. So Martin’s last summer in the village was punctuated with her coughing that she tried to muffle, pressing a fat wad of woolen fabric against her mouth. The house shrank along with Natalija, the old beams started to creak, and the spiders spun their webs slowly and in peace. Martin’s face acquired serious lines which Maksim’s absent half-smile, which had never fully left his lips, could be found in. She slept in the kitchen, believing that some of the evil cells might leave her innards in the night and settle in Martin’s lungs. She became even more silent: she was enveloped in dialogues with her own illness that grew like the bitter ivy on the north wall of the house. That was the summer she forgot to lean Martin up against the stone of the front door and mark how much he’d grown. When he’d arrived, the old scar at the level of his nose bothered him. The slight absence in the stone block led his memory to his everyday life that he, as was his usual practice, tried to forget. That’s why he turned a few rotten logs over in the courtyard and found a big rusted nail. The little anvil that propped open the front door acted as a hammer. He put a stiff palm on the top of his head and pressed his fingers to the spot that would get cut. He looked down the edge. Six shallow notches had appeared since the June afternoon he’d first seen Natalija. Four notches up and Sara’s fairy fingers groping through the shutters. Another notch sunward, and that metal space was hidden by ugly oak boards. For a few seconds Martin held the nail in place, showing his real height. Then he abruptly moved the sharpened tip up two inches and lunged at the bit of iron with all his might. A big bit fell off, significantly bigger than the notches made to this point, so big that a bird could fly through it. So big, he thought, that if the door closed, Sara’s hand would be able to go through it. The notch was open at the height of a grown man and Martin looked
at it a few moments as though he were looking into the future, measuring himself in time. That was how tall his father was, he imagined. From the darkness Natalija let out a hoarse, loud cough instead of a question, and Martin said that everything was fine, he’d just broken off a bit of roofing tile. He knew she wouldn’t notice what he’d done. She moved through the house never moving her eyes higher than the bed. She closed herself in her room spending hours with a heap of paper in her lap, carefully searching out dates, names, and places, as though hidden signs stood on that old paper, which she could decipher with the lucidity of the closeness of death. She’d rummaged through a thin bundle of photographs from which smiled the faces of the forgotten dead, cousins and parents. Martin’s father hadn’t been in that bundle. She’d only saved two ragged postcards, yellowed cards covered in green traces that Maksim Dedijer had sent from Brindisi. On one the big, hastily written letters spelled out: Natalija, if I try to explain, I’m afraid you won’t understand anything. After all, there’s nothing to explain. I’ll go over soon. Don’t worry about money. Just hold on. Keep yourself busy. I know you can. The signature: Your Maksim. And two weeks later: Natalija, the money is on the way. I’ll send it again. Keep as much as you need. The rest… You know what to do. Today we’re going over. I won’t write for a while. Don’t worry. Work is simple, food is good. I haven’t repented. No signature. Martin often held those cards. He’d take a piece of paper and imitate his father’s handwriting. The big M was stretched into two sharp horns of which one ended, he imagined, at a table in a kafana. The energetic lines witnessed his determination and carried-out decisions. He imagined his father leaning far over a table. He imagined his father holding the postcard in his left hand, and his right clutching his fountain pen. Simple meanings gathered in the invisible green drop at the sharp tip. A rough glass with two fingers of whiskey stood by his right elbow. While he articulated his few words in his thoughts, he looked a moment out the window, combing through the double row of cypresses down the street, a moment of golden gleaming that trembled in the glass. As though the answers to all the questions were in the spaces between. Whenever he reached for the postcards buried in the wooden trunk, he always had the same picture in front of his eyes. He imagined his father imprinted on the card instead of some important staircase for tourists, trying to imagine that man separate from Natalija’s oft-repeated memories. Because her memory, during Marin Dedijer’s last stay in the village house, had turned into a black, hopelessly tangled knot, from which protruded only a few grey threads. Martin’s attempts to grasp more secure traces that had witnessed the existence of Maksim Dedijer on this earth ended in coughing and, after that, the deep sleep which Natalija Dedijer would not wake from several months later. He knew that the illness
was frolicking in those old lungs, and that they would of a sudden become sodden ash that would, in the best case scenario, suffocate her. Two summer weeks during those long years hadn’t been enough to cultivate the complex emotions towards Natalija which would have rendered her impending death hard to bear or painful. Sometimes it seemed to him that the one reason why Natalija secretly regretted her inevitable departure from this world was actually because she would no longer be able to mourn the life and death of Maksim Dedijer. Two days before leaving he packed the scattered items himself into the black suitcases, and put the two postcards from Maksim in his blue trousers at the bottom. He intended to spend the rest of the time there in the house and on the steps. He wanted to enjoy the warm hours and in peace pack up the memories that tied him to that place. While sat on the stone block which wild mint grew from, he heard Natalija’s slow footsteps, and then her cough behind his back. She leaned against the wall, tired from walking, waiting for the eruption in her lungs to cease. The graveyard. Please, go and see how I fixed things up. Now there’s room for everything. She rested her hand on his hair and made a few small circles. He helped her go back in, holding her forearm. He carefully clutched the black cotton and felt her thin, chilled skin stuck to the bones that could no longer get warm. He’d only visited the village graveyard once, years ago, there, at the lowest notch on the beam, when he’d arrived the first time to spend a part of the summer with Natalija and the house. He’d arrived about noon. Natalija had cried till two. Then she’d gnawed the bone of a lamb shank with precision, peeked at his plate and concluded that he’d had enough to eat. She rubbed her face with her sleeve, pushed aside the bone and said: Let’s go. You need to bring flowers. She tied a scarf around her head, took candles from a nook in the stone wall, then said, Wait here, and went into her bedroom. She appeared a few minutes later with a huge wreath of plastic flowers that she’d already kept under her bed for a few days. Isn’t it lovely? Look. She held it with both hands as high as her head, so her veiled face was also framed with layers of plastic lilies, plastic laurels, and green vines. Frightened, he fell silent, nailed to the chair as Natalija’s expression changed from a gentle half-smile into an icy commemorative grimace on which the thin lips mouthed: Come here, child. This one is yours. He slowly stood, wiping his sweaty palms on his back pockets. She stretched out her arms, so that her face shrank in the circle. He could smell the flowers, which reminded him of Marija’s shampoo. He stretched out his arms. Like that… Look, she said, laying the big circle in his unsteady palms. Don’t let go. I’ll be right back, she said, and went into her room again. The plastic flowers pricked his forearms. With his tongue he felt the bit of goat meat stuck between his front teeth, which had been
bothering him since the start of the meal. He felt trapped, and hoped that something would happen soon to take him out of this cycle of incomprehensible traditions, ugly objects, and the unbearable smell of plastic slithering from under his chin all the way up to his nose. She appeared in the doorway with a blue bottle in the shape of a woman’s body and a yellow hat instead of a cap. She shook the ugly glass by her ear and nodded, satisfied, when she heard that the fat lady was half full. This will do nicely, she said. He expected her to press the unsightly thing to her lips and take a few sips. Maybe, he thought, it was a magic potion that would transform her into a bird, a spider, a cat, or a half-baked creature with a human form and an animal nature. He firmly decided that he would not take even a sip, even if Natalija insisted he drink. Come here, she said, and Martin closed his eyes, straightened his arms, and clenched the wreath that shared the space between two worlds hard. She came closer with her thumb over the spot of the cap. Once again she shook the bottle, and then started to sprinkle the liquid on the wreath, one shake after the other, close together, over the plastic lilies and laurel leaves. He felt a few drops land under his nose, another had fallen straight onto his lips, the biggest one had struck his forehead. Frightened, he dropped the wreath and rubbed his face with his palms. What are you doing? Do you want to ruin everything? Do you know how much these flowers cost? They’re your flowers, important flowers. They have to smell nice, she said. She took the wreath and put it in Martin’s arms again. Now hold it tight. And open your eyes, for God’s sake, she went on. The marks of perfume on his face, the sticky, sweet taste of plastic at the base of his throat, his lungs full with the whirring scent and the silence: it all made it so that Martin felt that he was inhaling Natalija whole, as though the woman would flounder and grow in his bowels, filling him with wrinkled layers of skin and the sharp blossoms of white lilies. What’s wrong, child? she said and gently took him by the shoulder. Let’s go outside. You’re pale. You need some air. When she took him out of the house, the sun took out both his eyes and a moment later had wiped away the drops scattered on his forehead. He coughed, leaned the wreath against the wall, and started coughing more loudly. Something kicked up in the polluted hollows of his little body and scratched his throat. He knelt and started to vomit on the hot stairs. Natalija held his forehead in her cool palms, waiting for his pale lips to give up all the sour remains in his upset bowels. Just as a man chews and swallows a piece of rotten meat, so Martin Dedijer consumed a moment in time spiced with several pictures. Though he’d finished vomiting, he didn’t feel cleansed. The bits of food he’d thrown up quickly dried and become a part of the ugly stone. Natalija brought a bucket of cold water and put in order what she could. Before Martin’s face had dried, they walked down the
stone path bordered by walls and the barks of dogs. At the wide bend, they passed around the area behind which Sara kept silent. When they passed in front of her house, Natalija didn’t forget to press her thin forefinger to her lips to swear Martin once again to silence. She pushed his back, making sure to always be behind him, at least two or three steps. He carried the wreath, turned, and always found the same expression: tightly-pressed lips and creased forehead, the grimace she’d prepared for the graveyard. The bell of the little church was overtaken by the cypresses, and by everything else, too. On the roof with the old tiles were bits of shattered glass. That glimmer was meant to keep away the birds and protect the sacred place from the whitish feces. The gate was bound with a thick chain, so Martin had to stand with the wreath in his hands to wait as Natalija’s fingers undid the iron knot. A few meters down, there was no fence at all, but for the moment she looked too solemn and important to violate any rules. The gate finally creaked open. A few large red insects flew up from the dried-up earth, and Martin once again felt fingers on his back that pushed him forward and forced him to step past the shabby concrete threshold that divided the world, it seemed to him, into the dead and those that would become that way. He walked between the headstones led by Natalija’s fingers that, depending on the direction, gently pressed a moment to the left, a moment later a little stronger, to the right. When he felt her palm on his shoulder, he knew they’d arrived: he had to stop. He also knew because at the same moment she burst into sobs, knelt down and started to pick the dried-up weeds that had grown up around the marble slab. From somewhere she pulled out a black woolen rag and a little bottle of olive oil. She poured a few thin lines in circular movements onto the dusty tomb, and then she knelt and started to polish it with both hands. She rocked forward and back, pressing the black wool salted with feeble tears. Martin watched all of this through the big ring of plastic flowers. He held the wreath in his outstretched arms and tried to capture the whole picture in the circle: the tomb, Natalija, and the church in the background. Then: a big turtle, an anthill, and the white trail of a passenger plane in a little part of the sky over the top of the wreath. All together it looked like the royal coat-of-arms of some funny, exotic dynasty sentenced to ruin. What Natalija, pendulating, and her black woolen rag warmed with olive oil added to that crest were big, deeply-etched signs that became visible only when the oil was evenly spread over the whole slab: Maksim Dedijer appeared in letters, sunny, clearly visible, useless and gleaming. When she returned the whole surface to a pearly black color, Natalija stood and straightened her clothes. A moment later she left Martin’s circle of vision to place the rag and olive oil at the foot of a nearby tree, and then her face returned to the center. The powerful cadre
announces a monologue, Martin knew. A few clipped and clear sentences would make reality take on the taste of inevitability. Events, no matter how meaningless, would be engraved in time just like the letters of Maksim Dedijer cut into the black marble of the family grave. Natalija’s voice quavered. She looked at the ground. Martin… You may now approach. Martin. Kiss your father, she said, and broke into tears. He stepped up very carefully, put the wreath against his lips and kissed one of the white plastic flowers. He breathed through his mouth trying to defend himself against the smell of the perfume. What are you doing? Bend down, child. Put down the flowers. Here, she said, indicating the place under the name. The names were still carved there: Todo and Jelica Dedijer. He put the wreath down at the end of the head of the marble bed. A black sun shone in the middle of the slab. He laid his palms there. Contrary to his expectations, he felt a pleasant chill that at once went up to his elbows. He turned to look at Natalija, and she started crying louder and started to rock as though they’d just turned towards the high seas on a little boat. Martin Dedijer pressed his lips to the chilled stone. He could smell the olive oil. The turtle had disappeared into the neighboring bush. The airplane trail had faded and drifted eastwards. He kissed the stone slab a couple of times, and then, considering it logically, kissed the first big M. He licked the dirt from his lips and crunched it between his teeth. He didn’t know then that under the slab were just two bodies, traces of the far-off creatures whose photograph Natalija had on her wall. Todo and Jelica: two-dimensional dustgatherers, staring into the direction of the roof beams. Maksim’s bones belonged in some other place. A thousand kilometers away, in the direction of little death and great misfortune. When she stopped rocking, she stopped her crying with three deep groans and said, That’s that. Now we can go back. She pressed the candle into his hands and showed him where to place it. She struck the match, and he offered the wick. When it was lit, they left the wax candle on the foot stone by the grave. The flame was defeated by the sun. It seemed that the thin candle was melting and they added to the heat with their gaze. Natalija crammed the graveyard props into her plastic bag, the bottle with the oil and the black woolen rag. She turned to the gate. Even blacker drops of sweat were drawn down her black back, which Martina recognized the frowning female figure between. Without the wreath in his hands, he felt lighter. He ran to the gate, waiting for Natalija to exit, and said that he would tie the chain. He tied the two ends and twisted four times. There were no intruders into the cemetery anymore. As they went down the narrow trail, he turned back a couple of times. From the church emanated the green light of the broken glass. Natalija didn’t look back. Her step on the way back was quicker and surer, and when Martin turned back the last time, his gaze
stayed trapped in the dense network of trees. He couldn’t have known then that next time he would be going to the cemetery alone, that he would step in the direction of the cemetery with the same feeling of dullness and discomfort, and that on the way back his body would shake, notched with new emotions. He couldn’t know, either, that that state would be the reason for his early departure from Natalija’s house, or that the day before would disturb the fragile balance established between several lives and several deaths. The death of Maksim Dedijer, his suffering in the cold water of the Black Sea, was for Martin a part of a tacit family mythology, and the man’s last hours that he knew almost nothing at all about. Driving around with the five meters of rope in the passenger seat, surprised by his own determination with the intention for this rope to end up around his neck, Martin tried again to imagine a briny hell. He didn’t have to try long to conjure up visions and pictures. It was not the steady unwinding of a story filled with heaps of imagined details. The sound of the radio would mix with a few biting tones of songs stuck in the worn-out speakers and Martin would clench the steering wheel as he had once clenched Natalija’s wreath of plastic flowers. The formless quivering in the left side of his stomach climbed up through his lungs and through the arteries in his neck and arrived at the neurons alight with familiar images: Maksim Dedijer on a stormy night clenching the salty steel rod fence on the boat Bianca Stella. He wipes the rain from his eyes and tries to make out the lights, the red lights, that had, he was sure, flickered on the horizon a few moments before. In the seconds between trying to properly wipe the lenses of his heavy German binoculars and attempting to spy any light in the direction of the mainland, Maksim imagined a few different things. Marija appeared as a silhouette, like a rounded nymph who carried a naked, smooth, and plump stomach. When they’d spoken before his leave-taking, she’d said that the child in her stomach was playing with the umbilical cord. That was the first time the wish came up to make the risky move to get free shots of adrenaline. Because the little hand would clench the umbilical cord, holding it to the point that it wouldn’t get enough oxygen, triggering upset in the brain from this deficiency. Marija had said that she was acting like an excited, eager baby that still held its umbilical cord in its hands. He didn’t react to the offered-up analogy, because it would have set off her nerves. He promised, holding his hand on her rounded stomach, that the Bianca Stella would be his last voyage.