Dogs and Others

by Biljana Jovanović

  And Danilo? Danilo takes my dreams, he lies and he steals, and he stays silent about his own dreams, not a word, not a syllable, but nothing and utterly nothing; only occasionally, when he is with Jaglika, does he whisper something. Danilo is my informer; he rats my dreams out to me, and rats me out to Jaglika. Could it be that Danilo simply has no dreams? He does not even sleepwalk, although that’s a most ordinary, trivial thing; but consequently he peers through the lock into my room while I’m sleeping (he’s been awake for several years running) and he steals what I’m dreaming about, and later he tells it to Jaglika, but only to her, fortunately.

  A Picture from Childhood

  Marina took Danilo and me to Tivoli one time! She arranged my left hand across Danilo’s right, squeezed our fingers (safety snaps), and then she checked the buttons on our identical coats, turned up our collars – she thought (at the time) that the wind was blowing but in fact it wasn’t (I know it wasn’t); she ran her hand quickly, impatiently, across our heads (the backs of two identical heads) and, as always, both Danilo and I felt the electricity popping from her palm. I thought (at the time) that faces were distorted and became half-shy or half-perverted grins – creditable grins, like masks at New Year’s – all because of this little current from Marina’s palm; but it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t that; Marina knows that it wasn’t because of that. Then she told us: ‘Go walk around a bit!’ For the first few moments, while she was still right behind our backs (like a policeman on the beat – the parent’s burden) and our identical itsy-bitsy smoothed-down heads, we walked along (three or four or five steps) like we were glued together – so we’d make the right impression on Marina, and then we both set off running without letting go of each other’s hands and we soon fell down. Danilo hurt his chin and scraped both of his arms (his coat tore), and it was probably the exact same for me. Okay, maybe it wasn’t his arms or shoulders, but his knees, it’s quite likely that it was his knees, but I can’t rule out that the scrapes and scratches were everywhere – on all the hard parts of his body. From that point on, the weird things started happening: whenever Marina would take us to the park, the woods, or for a ride on the merry-

  go-round, Danilo and I, although our hands were not hooked together, walked pressed up against one another and when we’d start to run, always, the same thing always happened, the same strange thing: it was as if we tripped each other up but no one else saw it, no one else could see it, and we would crash into each other. Then Marina, practical and wise (indifferent), when we had in the course of just one spring ruined all our trousers and jumpers, decided to keep us far apart from each other; at first, when she took us to the park or the woods or anywhere like that, she put herself in the middle, in between us (my God, it was meters of distance… let’s say, without exaggerating, it was two full meters), with me on the left side and Danilo on her right. When we came back it was vice-versa, Danilo on her left side and me on the right. In the lift it was one of us in front (underneath, with your head below her large maternal bosom) and the other in back, with your head at the level of her waist. Indeed, in the lift there was truly no chance (or only a negligible one) for activity that would result in torn clothing, but Marina, being practical and enterprising (those two things go together) and, a third thing, too – efficient, careful (those are one and the same) – considered precautionary measures everywhere at any time and in any place (great or small) to be indispensable, even though it might strike a person (a figure) on the outside as silly and superfluous.

  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, ev
erything 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.’

  V

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