Marina arrived exactly twenty-four hours after I’d informed her of Danilo’s death. She came with her husband. I was standing on the balcony when I caught sight of them getting out of a taxi: she looked altogether decorous, and he looked like he always does: and that means he had no look at all; he took her by the arm as they crossed the street; then they disappeared into the doorway; when I opened our door, they were just getting out of the lift – those few steps from the lift to the apartment. Marina, Danilo’s mother and my own, came slowly, slowly, looking as though she were going to faint at least ten times; I knew it was theatre, Marina’s famous theatre with its sophisticated and precise pantomime techniques. Her husband had been black-haired, grey, and black-haired again; and just for a moment it seemed to me that a sudden blush had hit his cheeks: he found this unpleasant. But then when I got a better look at him: I saw an insolent and calm and fat individual; satisfied with his well-tied black tie, satisfied with my mother’s cornflower-blue blinking eyes, satisfied with his role in her theatre, from the beginning, and now here on Svetosavska Street, too. Then, Marina, marching in, asked: ‘Where is he … Where is he?’
‘Who, Mama?’ I managed to get out.
‘Where did it happen, and why did you permit the autopsy?’
‘I didn’t. It was already all done by the time they called me.’
‘Why didn’t you call me right away, Lidia? And who were you expecting anyway?’
‘Mother, I can’t. I can’t tell you anything till this guy leaves …’
Marina’s husband obediently stepped outside, obediently and quickly, with an expression of superiority and scorn, which is totally typical of him, aside from its being typical for the faces of all inspectors, investigators past, present, and future; he left us for Jaglika’s room, not forgetting to slam the door, however; what a boor! And immediately after that he made several loud noises with his feet. What, was he clicking his heels or something?
Saluting?
Then I told her as much as I knew, what they had told me, what I had assumed, ever since the day he’d gone off to Palmotićeva Street. Marina protested, turned her head toward the window, refused to look at me while I was speaking to her; she pressed her lips together in anger, into a thin furious line; and at that point we were both silent for a while, but what needed to be said at that point, anyway? Marina’s husband was saluting again in Jaglika’s bedroom. All at once her rage burst forth (I suppose it was more than anything because some portion of her theatrical technique had failed her): and with unfathomable derision, fury, saluting could be heard again from Jaglika’s room, which now I could understand only as their joint training, I don’t believe that it was by chance, and she screamed: ‘Why didn’t you do something … How could you abandon him’ She was waving her hands right in front of my face, and drawing dangerously close to me, so much so that her face called forth all the hatred, every iota of it, that I’d been storing up, nurturing, for years, for my whole life actually … ‘What, how could I have, what should I have done?’ This was muffled by my intense desire to bust open her fucking mechanical-theatrical head, and smash that face on which for as long as I can recall there was never anything save powder and lipstick.
‘Why’d you send him to the hospital?’
‘He would’ve killed himself here, too.’
‘But you could’ve … Didn’t you notice anything?’
‘Listen, Danilo killed himself; they found him yesterday morning in the bathroom; he had wedged the door shut, Danilo wanted to kill himself, Danilo did kill himself, do you understand he didn’t get run over by a car, which you would have preferred, and that is probably the only normal thing, the one normal thing he did, and now stop blinking, stop blinking, stop your blinking …’
She pulled back as if to hit me, but in that instant the thud of footsteps could again be heard in Jaglika’s room, like code, a message, what in the … and right away Marina, as if by secret sign, lowered her hand and said in a placating voice: ‘If you’d called me, I would have come …’
At that moment (at every moment, in fact, I was capable of killing her) I shook her by the collar of that expensive dress of hers (Marina arrived from Milan all done up: with make-up, sweet blinking little eyes, pearls around her neck). She pushed me aside with one hand, but this wasn’t a question of physical strength but rather her actual power over me; she shattered, with the movement of a god and while she was full of loathing, the whole of my lethal rage. Jaglika also possessed this kind of power, and in equal measure. Then she announced, she just declared:
‘It’s your fault. You sent him to the hospital.’
‘Fine, Mother. At least now we both have a soul on our consciences. You have Dad, and I have Danilo. It’s just a shame that it’s not the other way around. It should be the other way around – the two of them should still be alive …’
‘You animal! It was what he himself wanted. He was responsible for landing himself in prison because he wouldn’t be quiet. He was guilty, do you understand, you animaaal, he himself, get it through your head, no one could have stopped him, he hanged himself, d’you underststaaand!?’
‘Himself! But it was you, Mother, who sent him. You. How is it possible for you not to know, and those convulsing legs of his – that grand decision was yours, Mother.’
The stamping of feet in Jaglika’s room stopped completely, and Marina’s husband came out to hold Marina – who had fainted again. I rushed outside. I needed air; it stunk in the house, unbearably. When I returned later that evening, I found them in the midst of some confidential discussion. I didn’t enter the room; I had no desire to see my Mother freshly powdered and refreshed after a good nap. Later I heard the opening and shutting of the outside door as they went out to dinner.
Danilo was buried the following day. The hospital delivered him in a closed sheet-metal casket, and no one knew what was inside, what parts of Danilo. Danilo’s girlfriend Mira didn’t come. She came the next day, after the burial. When they were shovelling out the soil, and as they started lowering the casket in, especially by that point, Marko Eyepiece, who had been standing on the edge of the hole the whole time, really close, with all those bags of his, began gushing tears, and he took off his glasses and smeared snot all over his face, and almost fell into the grave. He looked at me, and at Marina, and he rushed towards the exit without looking back. I never saw him again.
Marina and her husband left by train that same day; with her eyes blinking, she stated that it would be intolerable to spend another moment with me and all my suffocating hatred, that she already had enough torment in her life, and that she’d rather go back on foot than spend another night in Svetosavska Street.
Marina stubbornly cultivated a deep sense of compassion for her own person, like, by the way, all lower-order animals, and she was scared and undeviating in asking about the causes. And of course she believed that in both cases it was insanity, like father like son, and she, ah – she bore none of the blame for it. Both my father and Danilo lost their own minds, by themselves, and ceased to be; they pulled the blanket up over their own heads. That’s what Marina thought. She clung firmly to her mind and her life, with her legs arms breasts husbands and whatever else existed and came her way. She departed with a knot of fear and a lot of luggage, and I do not know where she will hide it, what corner she’ll kick it into and how she’ll prevail over it. As she was putting on her face in the bathroom before departing, she said this about my father, the same thing, yet again: ‘What do you want to hear Lidia he wanted it; it was his choice.’ As for Danilo, she might manage to find a more successful way of consoling herself, deluding herself. ‘Lidia let him go, and if I’d been here it would not have happened; nothing would have happened.’ Jaglika used to talk, for instance, about how my father abandoned his Marina, and how he never, ever should have dared to do that.
Actually, Marina fled, heedlessly, just as Marko Eyepiece had done. And if she could have, she would surely have put up a headstone for Da
nilo and for my father, two for the price of one, double or nothing, like they did in 1823 in Chelsea for the man Griffiths, who’d committed suicide, if she could have, and if the same penalties were in force today for suicide as back then.
The next day, I tried briefly to imitate Marina a little. I painstakingly dressed up, put on make-up in the bathroom, while loudly trying to say Marina’s words: ‘he himself wanted it, it was his choice.’ Plain and simple, for a moment I was Marina, but it didn’t work. It didn’t work at all. I smashed the mirror, and then locked Jaglika’s room up and transferred my things to Danilo’s room. I was incapable of doing the simplest things that both Milena and Marina could so easily do: when you’re cold, get dressed, when you’re hungry, eat something, when your eyes open, get out of bed; neither one of them, however, grasped the complexity and nausea connected with the most ordinary actions: moving one’s leg when your foot falls asleep, taking aspirin for a toothache, getting out of bed in general, or lying in bed in general, and so on, on down the line. Marina – a biological fact in my life, devoid of any greater meaning for the two of us, maternal warmth, I tried that with Milena; and now, you have to admit, any further attempt, at least a willing one, would be superfluous, to play the role of Marina or Milena in front of the mirror.
Instead of these stupid identity games, it could be like this: I simply imagine that I’m, let’s say, a bank clerk, and to the first man who turns up at my counter, I say, bankerly-cordially: ‘Here you are, sir,’ and subsequently I tell my colleague to the left, the one with the big boobs, when the gentleman leaves: ‘Damn, isn’t that man fine. So smooth. I recognize him from earlier and he’s been a customer here for ages …’ and she will start trembling on the peak of her left breast where the Olympic Games symbol is and sighing as if she were rapidly expiring, perishing like a big old dog; or, for instance, I imagine that I’m a conductor in the municipal mass transit system and that every day I smell people’s stink and my own, too, and it’s something that doesn’t bother me in the least. On the contrary. I punch tickets and dream that I’m marrying the mayor, or even the district commissioner, ooooh, that would be so classy.
In lieu of all that, I turn up out of breath at work, my work, winded by the fog, the bus, other people running in front of and behind me, next to me and across my path. But where does fog come from in August? I confabulated it. Ran smack into my boss, or his double. Both of them, as a matter of fact. When they caught sight of me at the door, one of them, or both of them simultaneously, said: ‘But you don’t have to come in your brother he …’
‘My brother killed himself. Did you know that a thousand people kill themselves every day?’
‘Where? Here, in our country?’ They stared at each other in astonishment.
‘Well, nooo. A thousand people per day across the surface of the earth.’
‘Okay, okay … You came to work?’
‘I came to fix your eyes (for both of you, I thought to myself) in case your operation didn’t take.’
The boss eyed me and my outstretched arms for a moment, flabbergasted, and then he remembered that my brother was one of the thousand, and he quite reasonably thought that I had, just for a moment, lost my mind in all the agitation. And even more reasonably (but therefore no less stupidly) he said: ‘It would be better for you to go on home, Lidia, and rest up. And you’re entitled to five more days …’
Seeing me beaming, however, and on the verge of hysterical laughter (so it seemed to him), he reached timorously for the telephone, but he’d had the wherewithal to make known as a warning and as an assertion: ‘You aren’t well.’
‘I feel wonderful. I just want to put your eyes back in, carefully, with the tips of my fingers. It’ll just take a minute.’ I had lifted my hands into the air again. The boss’s double was already dialling the telephone. Whom was he calling? The city ambulance service? I went outside, with the realization that Danilo was right, and that I had quarrelled needlessly with him that day. It was all the same if my boss had Graves’ disease or just looked that way. Pressing his eyeballs back, slowly, tenderly, or just saying so to him, was the same thing, utterly the same. The eyes of both my boss and his double returned to their proper spots.
A Story from Childhood
I think this happened, that it used to happen when I was six or seven, but certainly no older than that; there were ten of us children, but there were actually more of us, although I’m saying it this way now, because it seems right: ten; the reason for this numerical mix-up: it’s more in the realm of logic (various theories of probability show, naturally, varying possibilities; sometimes numerical values are distinct, that is to say, calculable, but sometimes they just aren’t), and corresponding to it, I mean, in harmony with this logical ‘confusion’ like a little flash of reflected light, or, to put it simply, and better: like a really small shadow this ‘confusion’ appears in my ‘memory’. With that said: something that does not exist is something that is also non-existent, with the same frequency of occurrence and without the possibility of numerical calculability. Thus it follows: we hopped a ride on the outside of a tram; it was racing at an incalculable rate past posts, telephone poles, and the whole breadth of the Kalemegdan hill; and behind me, adhering to me (that’s the smallest distance that exists) was a puny little man with glasses and a beret. Before me was a female being in a jumper; I had jammed my head into her shoulder (fear) and my fingers into her jumper (it had a loose weave). I was scared that I would fall, since I’d never ridden on the outside of a tram before. Back then the tracks ran so close to the branches of the trees that every ride-hopping was the most improbable of accomplishments; in every curve I had to turn my head, to nestle it against the car, just so that it didn’t get plucked off by some passing branch or pole. Everybody on the tram was a child, although they looked like adults. By the last stop I was drenched with fear, the tram slowed to a stop, of course; and the female wearing a jumper, that loosely woven jumper, was, as I could tell when I dismounted, a little girl from the building next to mine, whom I’d never seen wearing a jumper before. Jaglika was waiting at the station, and the first thing she did when I got off was to slap me three times, and then she jerked me along for ten minutes, by both ears, with both of her hands – for a whole year my ears were red and puffy. When we reached Svetosavska, and got near our door, she said she was going to tell Marina everything, and Marina was going to beat the daylights out of me so I’d remember what’s allowed and what’s possible and, for God’s sake, what is just not ever allowed and not at all possible…”
A Death in the Neighbourhood: On the Work of Biljana Jovanović
The novel you have before you is strong medicine. It depicts a young person’s attempt to ‘invent her childhood’ and ‘liberate her memory’ while she negotiates a bohemian, urban existence in Yugoslavia in the 1970s; it is more than graphic, and painful, and awkward at times: it is a tale of catastrophe, really and truly, annihilating catastrophe – but also of great courage. The narrator, Lidia, is rigorously probing her often wretched memories of neglect from childhood, even as she tries vigorously to navigate humanely her complicated living situation in Zemun (in greater Belgrade) in the apartment of her long-gone mother, which she shares with her dying grandmother and her suicidal brother. But the author also shows great courage here. That is why Dogs and Others is the single most effective introduction to the oeuvre of Biljana Jovanović (1953–1996), an important Serbian novelist and dramatist who is almost completely unknown outside of her home country.
Jovanović herself died of cancer in 1996; she was only forty-three years old. In the novel at hand, a different death provides the climax of the story: the protagonist’s brother commits suicide in the shattering resolution of the dysfunctional relationships and emotional drift of the various characters. And, as Jovanović herself noted in interviews, the country of Yugoslavia, which was the setting of her works, in all their concrete, cacophonous, rebellious, and tender glory, also died in the 1990s. It felt like
the end of the world, to paraphrase the author; and it cut the lives of her generation in half: between the past, memory, and nostalgia, and, in the other direction, war and nothing.
Who was Biljana Jovanović?
Biljana Jovanović (1953–1996) was a Serbian intellectual who wrote in almost all major genres; she published four plays, three novels, two collections of letters, and one anthology of poetry, as well as a sizable number of non-fiction pieces, mostly connected to her political activism. The popularity of her writings, especially her first two novels, has positioned her as a perennially beloved figure on today’s Serbian literary scene, even as her actual profile evolves from being a popular counter-cultural figure (even an author of ‘cult classics’) to more of a ‘writer’s writer’. As widely known, and rightfully admired, as she is among intellectuals and activists for her work in civil society, she was also a talented and courageous writer of fiction and drama.
Jovanović’s family had Montenegrin roots and, although she was born in Belgrade, she maintained active ties to that part of Yugoslavia. Her father, Batrić Jovanović, was a military official and political functionary in Tito’s Yugoslavia; her mother was Olga Ćetković, a journalist; both parents had been Partisans during the Second World War. The youngest of three children, Jovanović enrolled at the University of Belgrade in 1972 and studied philosophy. She was an early and active member of a large number of important human rights groups in Yugoslavia, beginning in 1982. These groups were concerned with issues from the death penalty to the environment, and from artistic freedom to feminism. Two of her most famous engagements were with the Belgrade Circle and the Civil Opposition Movement, both in the 1990s, when she had to add anti-war activism to her earlier engagements for pluralism and justice. She was an organizer and participant in a number of major anti-war campaigns and events, and she helped found a ‘flying’ (underground) workshop (or university) in 1992.
Dogs and Others Page 15
