‘And so, now you have some place to get that magnesium purgative, you’ll see, like in the wink of an eye, easy-peasy, I picked it up with the tip end of a knife, you can see how much of it that is, a crumb with a little water or on a dumpling…’ Jaglika told me that only I could have the medicine that she ‘used to get from Stefanida’ back then and take ‘after a meal, off the point of a knife-blade’ in order to cure my stomach pains.
Of course Jaglika never had any doubt that this was a question of the alchemical capabilities of an Armenian, in collaboration with a big-boned woman with a Byzantine name – a fact also not without importance…No…not with Byzantine eyes, though, but, let’s say, Egyptian ones (I could see this on the photographs; one of them was from 1940, right before Stefanida’s death, and it was as plain as day there, along with the magical hands of her husband, with his short, white fingers – on the photograph – that were on Stefanida’s shoulders; Stefanida was seated). Jaglika thought, and people of her ilk always thought this way, that ‘foreign medicines’ were simply clever, including those foreigners arriving from various lands that the ship Kumanovo brought to Dubrovnik in 1936. Jaglika had a very good memory, and I’ve already said that one should not doubt the memory of a demiurge; she said that in August of ’36 there were, just on that ship alone, a thousand of them, of the foreigners.
Jaglika also remembered January of 1940. She was in Zagreb, and there were unthinkably large crowds, waiting for the regent, Prince Paul; she said that everyone who was supposed to be there, was there, and that Croatian politician Maček himself delivered ‘that famous welcome speech’.
What could she do, in January of 1940, at the train station in Zagreb, our Jaglika listening to those sublime words about his majesty, his wisdom regarding the two peoples, connected with the ‘peace-loving Princess Olga?’ What could she do then, or a little after that? She thrust deep into the pocket of the warm coat that she’d made from her own stock of cloth, the little Orthodox god of her father, and the big Catholic one of shiny brass – like the cross on the little chain around her neck – she brought out and held in her hands, when she clapped, like the other 100,000 souls present were doing there at the station; and again when she danced (with the brass in her hands) after Maček finished, in the name of the Croatian people, his welcome speech, wishing the Regent and his wife, Princess Olga, a ‘pleasant stay’.
The year 1941 found her still in Zagreb. That was when her two relations vamoosed without a trace – at least as far as she’d tell us; she came back to Nikšić; in that grocery shop. There was nothing for the upcoming years of war; it was shuttered and sealed; naturally enough, and the other stores also went under. But Jaglika nonetheless wept only on account of the grocery shop in Nikšić. Of the people who burnt it down in the last year of the war, Jaglika never once said ‘May God grant that not even their carcass should remain!’ But Jaglika’s mercantile mentality was, however, indestructible. She almost never spoke of the war years; she’d only mention, once in a while, on the subject of Stefanida’s burial: ‘Well, it was wartime, and war is what it is.’
XXI
I think that not even the late Stefanida, nor her probably also deceased Armenian husband, may God grant peace to both of their souls, could devise as effective a medicine against insomnia as what I came up with myself: first a plan came to mind that had sincere and courtly aims, and that meant: humiliation, penitence, obedience, and everything that appertains to those, to intensify them to the upper limit, but by no means beyond it: hard-heartedness, recalcitrance, nervousness (that’s a little matter that people, uneducated people, think is physiological), decisiveness, conviction, and the rest, to drop to the lower limit, but by no means below it. The preparations take two or three hours, but in such a way that, for the last half an hour, you have to multiply to an infinite degree (if it’s possible) the efforts to attain the feeling that you are an idiot; swill. And so, here’s how I did it (this is, it’s true, only one of the ways): I watched television till the channel went off the air, and beyond; the TV was on continuously, as was the radio; then in a rather synchronized fashion I turned on everything in the house (appliances and the rest of it) that was capable of tapping, banging, gurgling, singing, shrieking, burning, heating up, and so on, on down the line, the lights were switched on too, of course; then I would participate with all my heart in the whole uproar, more or less with confidence, if not totally artlessly. In the final fifteen minutes, I would have deceit kick in: 1) I repeat out loud: ‘I do not want to sleep, what do I need sleep for, I’m going for a stroll’; 2) I get dressed, I put on my shoes, I place a cap on my head – without regard for the time of year or any other kind of time; I carry out all these actions (there’s only one plot, because of the goal), patiently, attentively, and that means without that physiology, or more precisely, nervousness. After that, I walk outside; the walk is also a ruse: two laps, or two and a half, around the building, and then I come back with slow steps – this is premeditated: in the lift (even in the lift) I repeat loudly: ‘I will take that book, and that one, too, plus a dictionary.’ Furthermore: I sit down on the bed, with my shoes on, and the hat on my head (the bed is, of course, unmade), I take up only the dictionary and to myself, very seriously, I say out loud: ‘pay attention to this, remember this…’ After about half an hour I slept as soundly as a baby, or as soundly as a moribund (like Jaglika), with her shoes on, and a cap, on an unmade bed. It turned out well, quite well, like some sleight of hand for people who don’t wear caps, but who should, constantly, summer and winter, or to be more exact, without regard for the time of year, or for time in general, as in Jaglika’s day.
And Jaglika? Rolled up in her fifteen blankets, affixed to the rocking chair, with pom-poms on her slippers, the red ones, and with her glasses, always with her glasses on the tip of her nose, day, night, at noon – always; but even though, for a certain period of time, she hadn’t seen anything – neither with them nor without them; most definitely, if Jaglika were really a good servant of God, she would grasp the idea that it was necessary to get rid of the glasses (back when, back then when she lost her sight), and not to put them away, on a shelf, or on the window sill, or under her pillow – I mean get rid of them, make them disappear – like a gangster in a good old thriller; because she would see again through the intervention of God’s emissary, after she’d passed through the gates of death. To her misfortune, Jaglika had, however, more faith in technology and medicine, in the Pharisees that is, than in God and his emissaries.
I shouted in the voice of a thirty-year-old wretch, who neither does business nor thumbs her nose at God and God’s will in anything at all, but rather, ruefully prays and suffers, and despite that barely clings to life, and who has not a trace of joy, nor at least a trace of balm; nothing; envious and enraged at Jaglika’s ninety years, at Jaglika’s sense of satisfaction in that rocking chair – opposite the window; at Jaglika’s fortifying sleep, peaceful, after which she awakens ready for ninety more years. And I, with my puffy eyelids, legs, and hands, unready for another single day; I prayed (thinking of Jaglika’s brass crucifix around her neck, and the other cross under her pillow) to disappear, not to die and not to live, but disappear like a gangster, and in a film with no sequel; with hatred, which concludes with a sentence uttered from the side-lines, out of the silence, like an ambush, slyly, however it had to be – when one is making common cause with mysterious forces (for help I even called upon the spirit of Stefanida and the spirit of her Armenian, for who knows all the things they know their way around in, the pair of them there in Istanbul, and they probably at least know enough about these things here to hang their hats on): let Jaglika die, and then me; may Jaglika die first, immediately, now, this minute… I’m watching already… let Jaglika die first, and Marina, and Danilo, one after the other, dear God please, precisely in this order, let them disappear. I prayed devotedly for their deaths. It didn’t work; I was unable to say the prayer loudly, softly, or in a whisper – into my own ear
and although not entirely to myself, rather convincingly.
XXII
It occurred to me, unexpectedly and abruptly, like when a pebble pings on a watery pane of glass, that my idiotic, passionate abandon (laziness?) could not go unpunished. If there were not, everywhere around me, an entire forest of diligent women, all kinds of diligent women, if they didn’t have their malice and their severity, I would feel intimately connected to my own laziness, inseparably, and I would not sweep it away or exchange it for someone else’s, not for anyone’s, no matter whose, never, I’d manage not to do that, even if from now on into the future I needed to continuously wear a cap on my head, like on the shorn head of Marina Tsvetaeva. I say there is nothing of all that in the painful and tedious system of merits: merit at work, for the fatherland, for the family, for one’s enterprise in general, and et cetera (I’m not mentioning that welter of others, the most painful ones: the medals or decorations, of the first order, the second, the third, the fourth, for instance), Jaglika with her merited retirement, the rocking chair and the window across from it; Marina with her well-deserved dead first husband, his merited retirement, and her meritoriously earned second husband; my merited boss, who is deservedly grateful to the mother of God (he put up a stone tablet to her in Zagreb, on that stone wall in Kamenita Street – in gratefulness for his health, his fifty years of life, a child, a wife, everything earned, for the glory and honour of the mother of God). And so, it is when your own mind fails you – a round pebble, shit stuck on a bird’s wing, on a bench in the park across the street from the library, as happened to me. It’s no longer possible (or maybe only temporarily so) to flee from fear, from the reddened, hysterical, worthy, multiplied faces of Jaglika, Marina, and the Boss – which are shrieking, suffocating me, screaming, even attacking animals, stirred up as if they were excited from head to toe, like postponed sexuality, or Catholic priests: he who eats bread cannot survive, and do not create him by the sweat of your brow and God’s in a world that is bursting with creation, with work, according to God’s will, for the glory of God, and to our joy and well-being, may the loaves of bread grow and swell women’s stomachs, may they grow and shrink and so forth forever and ever amen.
I (or, more precisely: my body) neither swell up nor burst open, neither like bread – the zealous worker – the heavy labourer, nor like a woman’s stomach, with the exception of when, at the beach, I’d glimpse some firm, real man’s thighs, overgrown with light brown hair, and the balled-up package, that mythological package, underneath a pair of Speedos with the American flag on it. But maybe it didn’t happen like that; maybe I never did, under any circumstances. And I kept on extending and then breaking off my sick leave, extending it and interrupting it; serious investigations of me (my body) were at issue; my boss was surely thinking (with delight?) that I wasn’t going to survive! Or, what is more likely: my boss knew that there was no illness in my body anywhere, but he couldn’t bet against there being one in my soul (my Achilles’ Heel); he was keeping it to himself, however. I have no idea why my boss wasn’t talking; maybe he had a good understanding of hypochondria! But really, if that’s the case, then how did this miracle of good-natured patience manage to sneak into his big ugly head, into his colossal fatty body, into his squeaky voice, and cause all this, this uproar in him; as if I had secretly sent him someone who spoiled his fun, or the wrong key, or something along those lines, but the point is that my boss was confused, and his motivation (relating to heroic labour citations) dwindled. Or a tiny solution to an equally tiny enigma was concealed in my boss’s doppelgänger. My boss had a double. His double came into the library exactly half an hour after the start of my workday. He’d roll in like this, this big gut through the narrow doors, inaudibly (the doppelgänger has rubber soles; all doubles have rubber souls, or none at all) and all at once overflowing with life and imagination it (the big gut) stands there dumbfounded before me. And what do I see, I simply don’t believe it, I take off my glasses, I put them back on, take them off, put them on, rub my eyes – of course, oh hell, that’s exactly it: a pink-white face like a child’s rear end, the face of a forty-year-old is the butt of a five-year-old, this is uniquely stupid – smooth, without a shadow, or a wrinkle, with no possibility for you to hypothesize as to how you possibly encounter anything at all on that face other than a vast pink soft whiteness and watery eyes – there was nothing to differentiate the rest of it (there was nothing else there), for example, no mouth was in evidence, due to all the lard.
Consequently, my boss’s double, a.k.a. the gluttonous mass of meat, massed from the neck down and from the neck up, impudently, persistently came and did what he usually does: swarms over me, with his weight, tries to force me to lay hands (as if I were asking for alms) on his stupid member, and softly pushes his face between my breasts, slimes me with his watery eyes, that’s how he demanded everything of me, how the soft white creature made its demands …
And fine, a person, any person, might think even soft white creatures with arses instead of faces have the same needs, and stuff like that, as those others, un-soft and slightly prettier creatures … There’s no doubt that God arranged things this way. But nonetheless it appears, nonetheless, it’s not advisable to pile up, one alongside the other, like firewood – like chunks of human meat as well, divine affection for all the shapes that God created over and above the unfitness of the physiological (!) desires of my boss’s white double for me.
I’m spouting nonsense; my boss’s doppelgänger is an intelligent man (he writes successfully for television, as does my boss), despite having the arse of a five-year old child on his neck instead of his head – incidentally, my boss’s double burst unexpectedly (!) into the library with a rather vague intellectual requirement – this was last summer: ‘Which book should I take with me, on summer vacation?’
‘Take a summer one.’
‘What do you mean … a summer one?’
‘OK, well, I mean a summer book, a book that can swim, sunbathe, and the rest of it.’
‘And you’re… haha… that’s like a… eh? Eh?’ (The face – the child’s arse – stretched into something resembling a smile, like chewing gum; let’s say: on a popular television commercial.)
‘I was being serious; there exist half-spring, summer, winter ones, one after the other, books, you understand, like all the rest of it.’
‘Fine. Which book do I take?’
‘Well, do you want something about animals, about bestiality too by the way?’
‘I don’t like animals.’
‘Then do you want something about ontological and ordinary orgasms?’
‘Who’s the author of that one?’
‘Plato, on the desires of creatures and the desires of the body. Haven’t you read it?’
‘I have. I read it.’
‘Then why the question?’
‘Lidia, do you want me to tell you something interesting?’
‘I do not. Interesting is boring.’
‘Listen, Lidia, I’ve watched people drink water from a tap without having a glass in their hand.’
‘I’m not listening.’
‘It’s very interesting, Lidia … They all turned their heads to – ’
‘Write a television series, or the script for a commercial on how to drink water.’
‘They did this with their heads – ’
‘Listen, it only seemed interesting to you. Anyway, this is just a bunch of hogwash that you’re trying to force on me! Do you want a book or not?’
He left, after taking the smallest book possible: The Memoirs of Capt. John Creighton, the one in that cool red hardboard cover. What’s he going to do with that? And from that day onwards, he began coming by regularly. At first I thought that he was my boss’s twin brother, in the flesh, and later, that he was his regular brother; it turned out later, after a while, that the two of them have neither blood ties nor any other kind; I realized that it was a matter of just being the boss’s double; in the beginning this un
usual phenomenon entertained me; but later on complications emerged; the doppelgänger turned up whenever the boss was on the road; he never showed up when the boss was not away on a trip. My work at the library began to split in two. I had two bosses, the first one on the left side and the second on the right, like Jaglika had two gods. Boss number one, and boss number two; god the first and god the second – and everything was believable, as if that sequence or order did not exist, as if there were no rankings at all. So, yeah. I remained at home more and more; I took double sick leave, one for my boss, the other for his double; definitely, double seals and stamps, documents, and the rest; it required double the effort from me: two long mornings in the courtyard of the outpatient clinic, on a bench; at least that’s how I managed to make the acquaintance of two little girls whose mothers were doing their sick leave with two doctors in the same clinic as mine. It’s completely superfluous to describe them; and they wouldn’t be able, even if they wanted, to reveal the secret of the tenderness that they constantly displayed for each other before my eyes.
Dogs and Others Page 11
