Dogs and Others

by Biljana Jovanović

  A Story from Childhood

  Oh, when was it; that event, like an unlikely theft, one under improbable circumstances in the middle of the day – logically – and therefore under the one thousand per cent vigilance of the residents of the entire city and its surroundings, to be sure, all the newspapers wrote (which demonstrates perfectly that they have nothing to write about); I was completely alone, in the large, very much colossal, confines of a hotel; nowadays, as far as I’m concerned, it could have been the premises of some terribly significant institution, like the Ministry of the Interior, for instance, or a foreign embassy, but it wasn’t. It was a hotel. For a long while I was umming and ahing about what I should steal (in my childhood days I stole, incessantly almost, all over the place, without any obvious need): a jade ash tray, a little ceramic dish for ice cream, or a silver dinner plate with some additional wooden dishes, containing the remains of a red foodstuff. All at once, I decided on (it will never be clear to me what had such an unexpected influence on my choice) the medical supplies in a box meant for confectionery. I shoved it into my handbag and made for the door. The best thing would have been for me to open the door quickly and noiselessly and slip away; but at that moment someone rang the bell: the postman was at the door (hale and hearty) – and, but of course, everything was like in children’s stories: the postman is righteous and he hates thievery with all his heart and soul, he’s deeply tanned and dangerous – that is, strong; therefore I, probably, think right at that moment how that righteous giant of a man is going to separate my little head from my slender neck, and then, in lieu of that whole drama, he shoves a package under my nose and growls: ‘Sign for it, little one!’ I, apparently confused, refuse, wondering what in the…Maybe I also tell him that the little package wasn’t for me, but he in the instant that followed relieved me of all doubts, growling once more though now with more of a bite: ‘C’mon, don’t dawdle. Sign it, girl!’

  In the little package were scores of UNICEF greeting cards, the agreeable little designs with roosters and hen houses and the other little objects as well, but here was also a tiny metal badge with Peter Pan on it, and several pieces of paper with envelopes! The package was addressed to Marina. I don’t recall exactly when I left that building, but, upon arriving home, I said not a word to anyone, nor did I display in any way any of the evidence of what had happened: Peter Pan, the greeting cards, and the medical supplies I shoved under the carpet – in that corner, that portion of rug that was under the cupboard in the living room. Later it was revealed, however, that I had not gone unobserved: the next day there was nothing under that carpet. Everybody was played dumb. I attempted several times – over the course of the following days – to start a story, sort of from far away, about how I’d had a few items, and how maybe some thieves had broken in, and did anything else go missing, other than my petty objects, but no one, a grand total of no one, had anything to say, a big fat nothing, as if I had cooked up the whole issue in a fit of delirium – which no one, truth be told, will ever know. Maybe.

  XXIII

  For ten days I tried unsuccessfully to reach Milena by telephone, and here’s what was really happening: Milena disconnected her phone, and I know this for a fact now, in her intervals of dining, making out, ritual showering, sleeping, sleeping with L., sleeping without him; the remaining calls, which were an encouraging sign, whenever it would happen that the line was busy, and for a while right after … no one ever picked up – but they did show that Milena sometimes availed herself of the phone from time to time between these disconnections. I started dreaming of how I might ring her up; the telephone turned into Milena, and Milena became a telephone. Milena as the handset and its little holes that were dirty green in colour; and when, on day eleven, I managed to connect with her, it was as if I were holding, instead of the receiver, in my quivering, perspiring hand, Milena herself, live and in the flesh; upon hearing her voice, it immediately became clear to me that it’s impossible to consort with a god when you yourself are not one!

  But I should probably conceal, in an interior pocket like a thief, what it was that rolled so smoothly across my tongue, and palate, and teeth, that slippery non-existent sweaty sentence: ‘I wish we could get together’ – I said it calmly, it was drawn out, slimy, like when you pull money out of your pocket, with that same silly and unnecessary slowness. But I couldn’t endure, right then, or actually at any time, the reaction of Milena’s disgusted and slightly indifferent face to a different possible sentence: ‘Milena, I must, must see you’ – that would make no sense, after all, in a way identical to that first sentence.

  Milena then, after a fairly short silence, said something about two or three topics, mentioned her L., yawned two or three times, and that was it. And now Milena, lowering the receiver, told L., just as she had told me, earlier: ‘I’ll have a cigarette after you’re done with your snack.’ What a tactic! So perfect, in every case, no matter what. I should ask her, for Danilo’s sake, ask her to stick her moon-face in at Svetosavska at least for a minute. But I didn’t. I did nothing of the sort. Danilo is convinced that I drove Milena away, and about envy he says truthful things: it starts from the middle of one’s stomach then down, along an unknown axis, jagged and long. It was hard to explain to Danilo that L. loves Milena a lot more, I mean, in general and from whichever angle you look at it, L. loves Milena so much, much more, and more and more … incomparably more, even more than Danilo’s redoubled hatred of me, and my small quantum of hatred and small quantum of love for Milena. Anyway, he never felt (saw) the shape and length of Milena’s calves, and then the two dimples, the two dimples on the inside of her thighs, way up high, sensitive to everything in the world, like eyes; so it’s just that much easier for him, or very much the opposite. I don’t know for certain, but doesn’t Danilo also have a big rock in his stomach, as do I, and the two of us, as relates to Milena, come across as two sides of the same coin.

  In the library I frequently charge people fines, and I stuff the money in the left pocket of my coat, cool as a cucumber, and tear up the receipts. An unnecessary precaution! No patron would ever think to parade his or her receipt (the duplicate being in my possession) in front of my boss’s nose, or his doppelgänger’s, for the purpose of casting out a demon, ‘coz what would that do for a reader’s life; those are matters for bill collectors, wicket-workers, waiters, and maybe even the taxpayers. Every half hour I dash off to the bathroom; oh, what magic charms masturbation possesses! On the warm wall (because of the heating units in operation) my icy body, and across from me, well-thumbed books, arranged in stacks reaching to the ceiling. The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, in a blue hard cover, and after that Eugénie Grandet, and so forth, and a few dictionaries; the upper part of my body leaning against the wall, because of my shoulders (as if someone else put them there) – actually, with the lower part of my body inclined away from the wall, and improbably accustomed to my fingers. I have lived so long without Milena; now I place her moon-head where it belongs. Afterwards I turn the tap on, wash my hands – psychological and quasi-psychological interpretations are pointless; the washing of one’s hands is not a gimmick done with the super-ego, and with your ancient forebear, who is forever wagging a threatening finger, nothing to do with that bullshit parade of words from the so-called archetypal homelands, but rather, quite simply: on my fingers, my thumb, my index and middle fingers, remain the recognizable scent of Milena’s pussy, definitely not mine; all that grunt work has little do to with me; Vespasian accurately calls it momentary illusion, and naturalness, although it would look like something else to my boss, and to his double too.

  XXIV

  The month of May is not exactly the greatest time to die, or especially to be buried; Jaglika spent the whole night dying, horribly slowly. Danilo was sitting in his room; he would show up periodically and ask, and keep on asking: ‘Is that her soul, Lida, those little white bubbles?’ Or: ‘Surely that’s the soul, right, Lida? What else could there be that’s white l
ike that? Give her some water. Can’t you see she’s thirsty, Lida!’ He came back every half hour to look: ‘Not yet. Those little bubbles are still coming out.’ And he looked amazed. He seemed to be off his rocker. Daaaaaammit! Jaglika and I passed the entire night, in fact, alone. I should’ve left her in peace.

  At first she was just a little yellow, and later she was yellow all over; and by morning she was dead; she was with God, completely white and totally pure. For days before that she’d been repeating: ‘I never did anything nasty to anybody.’ And Danilo tried to cheer her up: ‘Baba, stop it with those stories about sin. How did that one curse go in Hungarian; come on, granny, that curse in Hungarian? Fuck you and your copper angel whistling on seven weeping willows, granny, was it whistling or playing the flute? Eh, Baba?…’ But Jaglika, who had long since forgotten the language of her mother, would say: ‘Not seven but ten, d’you understand Danilo, ten willows.’ And Danilo bustling around the rocking chair holding the half-dead Jaglika, stubbornly: ‘Come on, Baba, in Hungarian, please Granny…’ Jaglika wasn’t paying attention to the fact that everybody was asking her, the real angels and the souls of the dead, to speak Hungarian, and then to think back and tell us about things from the time when she had two or three shops; it couldn’t be worthwhile; even I wouldn’t be worth it, not to mention Danilo’s wish to hear just one curse in her mother’s language, in her language. Jaglika counted off her sins on the fingers of both her clenched hands, as if she were totting up the receipts from the last two hours at her shop in Nikšić; or as if she were stacking groceries on the shelf opposite the door in that same store in Nikšić.

  In the morning, when she was dead, she had the face of an embryo; everything was erased, by the hand of a copper angel and by the hand of the Jesus on the wall. The coroner, that graveyard doctor, arrived, pulling on a pair of transparent plastic gloves. He turned the stiff, deceased (having now been introduced to this god and that one), and now angelic Jaglika first onto one side of her body and then the other – like a small, planed tree trunk; he unbuttoned her shirt, felt for her pulse through her breast, and then flipped her over on her back and tapped two or three times with his fingers. Danilo said over and over from the doorway: ‘Be careful, be careful, she’ll break, I mean it for God’s sake watch out!’ Then the coroner sprinted off to the bathroom, tripping over his own feet, washed his hands, threw the plastic bag-gloves onto the floor, pressed a piece of paper with an official stamp on it into Danilo’s hand (saying that Jaglika died a natural and not a violent death), and left, taking two steps at a time on his way down. Before his visit I had washed Jaglika, and dressed her; Čeda of Little River helped me – he had come half an hour after getting Danilo’s phone call. He was panting, and growling: ‘My God, is she heavy!’ Danilo lugged the washbowls in and out, muttering fretfully every time: ‘Is there really more, Lida? What is this?’ Meanwhile the vital fluids just poured out of Jaglika, and after they placed her in the coffin, they kept on; puddles remained on the bed.

  All Marina did was send a telegram, and send money, by wire; so that her mother would be buried where she wanted, but she said she wouldn’t be able to come to the funeral, because all the transport workers in the world were on strike; bull-shitter. But none of us knew where it was that her mother wished to be buried: here, there, waaaaaaay over heeeere. Then Čeda suggested that I give him the money for everything, and he would take care of it all hunky-dory. So Jaglika was cremated; there was no room for her under the earth here, and no room there, but only in the oven. The most random set of relatives flooded into the house, blew through in perilous bursts, and one after another they grew irate and started talking all this bullshit about Christianity, ‘a decent burial’, ‘just not like this, burning her up’, and all the rest of it.

  XXV

  Vespasian’s letter: Dear Lidia, what I’m sending you now is my tuppence worth on the idiocies connected with the so-called ‘woman question’. My text consists of two sections, as you’ll readily see; the first is a pretend pamphlet – yeah, right! But the second part is a description of my own experience when I was still mobile and could still serve (that, you know, is the swindle about usefulness to society, the dogmatic hocus-pocus: We are all building this together, we stand ready … and so forth, and you know, yourself, why). I’ve already mailed it to the editors of a daily newspaper, but they rejected it. One observation, Lidia: first: I hope that you aren’t so dumb as to think that my general (interior and external) dissatisfaction with my wife is the reason for my writing all of this; you’re familiar with that unhappiness from my earlier letters; second: I also hope, or better, I expect you not to react the same way as the aforementioned person. When I showed her the finished text, all she did was brush it off, make a squeamish expression, and say: ‘Phooey. I thought that you were at least literate, at least in terms of mechanics, even if you don’t have any brains.’ In the event that this should occur to you, I will find out about it somehow. Consider this first: you belong to that enormous majority of unintelligent women, and you are by no means, not one little bit, any different from the horde of insatiability and stupidity that is regrettably throttling our civilization. And secondly: consider this letter of mine the last in my series of attempts to converse only from one side, in accordance with my codices, for you are a woman, and all women are curious and talkative (always, always, always) and I am consequently certain that you’ve greedily devoured all my letters, read each one of them multiple times even, and that you’ll read this one all the way through. I know that, little Lidia; you do not possess enough indifference to chuck this letter, just as you haven’t tossed out any of them before when they were unread. Now, on to those two texts, or whatever you wish to call them, but Lidia, do not fail to take these warnings seriously, I beg of you. The first text is also in the form of a letter (I sent it to the newspaper), and letters are, you know, appealing because of the direct contact – from only one side; there can be no answer, right, Lidia!

  ‘My dear working and non-working women, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if, for once, you were to inquire about whether or not your stretched-out pelvises could be used to make seals and stamps for use in government offices, and ultimately for any kind of offices in general, seals and stamps for various and sundry files on which depends the fate of the world; otherwise known as metallic orders and decorations for success and merit. Does anyone at all benefit from your inflated and fabricated tenderness? I know that you all know, right down the line (no matter how dumb you pretend to be) that civilization had to develop, inter alia, as a colossal effort to rein in (and sometimes destroy) your collective sexual insatiability, your potency, which is in essence, seeing how it’s unlimited, destructive. In this thousand-year labour, the male sex has lost all its power, its biological power, and now it is faced with its own annihilation. Your irrationality has resulted in rationality. Fortunately for everyone around the world, you all lack the wisdom to know how to deal with this fact. Some among you whine about women’s issues, or the woman question, or whatever that marvel is called, while others among you bray hysterically about feminism, and all of you live in the shared error that your fat or skinny, small or large arses, your powdered faces, your grievous sexual troubles, the hair on your legs – that these are more important than the emblem or trademark of an export-import firm. But this is how things look: whenever some of you, or maybe even all of you, come home from work, scream at your husband or your children that there’s no lunch to be had, your husband scarpers out the door, he doesn’t give a fuck about feminism or what you’re shouting, and then his mother, with whom you’re living gives you this rot about how for example her son could find someone who’s if not better than you at least more hard-working and calm. In the evening your lawfully wedded one mounts you with his full imagination, while you lack imagination, your right arm goes to sleep and his big and always damp stomach nauseates you, but you console yourself with the fact that that stomach is at least legitimate, and that little bit of woe, do
wn below, is legit too. You even get insomnia, oh, the horror, that weak-willed soft man, that lukewarm boring world. And while sleeplessness has you in its grips you remember, you think back all of a sudden, to your mother’s words about marriage, the sacred institution of marriage, about how for instance they’re all the same, et cetera, and embracing that lukewarm wet stomach you fall asleep in the blink of an eye like a baby.

  The family hearth, your mother would have said, is the strongest flame in the world. Later on you or some of you, or indeed all of you, succeed in snatching a lover, who like the rest is non-committal, old, boring, and dumb, but its status is all right, and its legitimacy. And never and I mean never would you be able to do better; your imagination is wanting, my dear ladies, you’re never going to have it, and that’s why life and the world are so difficult for you. This whole lousy brouhaha about feminism comes down to this: it bothers every one of you, whether you’re big-arsed or small-arsed, it’s all the same all over the world, every one of you, lame, mute, deaf, hysterical, schizoid, whatever, you forget them when necessary: you would give up everything, status, parties, factions, and the rest of it, for one single hand, a moist masculine one. If only you knew how to effect this sickly sweet and vulgar substitution: the state for the little wet hand of a man. Therefore, be intelligent, the way you’ve been since time immemorial. Think with passion about your elastic vaginas and uteruses, stretchable enough for you to envelop the world several times over; what more do you need? And the imagination, which you do not have, leave it out of the picture, since anyway it has no connection, and you all know this quite well, to the mechanics and the superficiality of your own big ugly bodies, your patches of unwanted hair, powders, cosmetics, ultimately, your being!