Mars

by Asja Bakić

  “Literature is,” she said, “the primary link between life and death.”

  It seemed to me that they both glorified writing too much, but I didn’t want to interrupt.

  “We need the heat of the written word to open a small rift so we can step into reality. You’ve read fairy tales, you know how it works.”

  “But fairy tales are made up,” I said.

  “Fairy tales are, but death isn’t. There’s no fucking around with death,” said Tristesa. “Death reaches even the most inaccessible places, but only through literature. Otherwise death can do nothing.”

  “And the other arts? What about painting, sculpture, music?”

  “Those don’t interest us,” they said. “They can, of course, be of use, but writing excites us more.”

  I closed my eyes. I imagined my unicorn friend Sebastian.

  “Do you hear what these two morons are saying?” I asked him.

  “I hear, I hear,” he whinnied. “Remember Heraclitus. When people die, they’re confronted by what they didn’t expect or consider. Count to fifty to calm down.”

  “I’ve forgotten numbers,” I said. “I can only count to ten.”

  When I opened my eyes, Tristesa and Zubrowka showed me one of their boxes.

  “This is where we put the most valuable manuscripts.”

  “Who wrote them?” I asked.

  “That’s a secret,” Zubrowka said. “But you’ll know when we return to the living.”

  “Now you must keep writing,” said Tristesa. “We don’t have much time. The necessary condition for our departure is a total solar eclipse.”

  “That, or a full moon,” added Zubrowka. “Really, it’s all the same. There just needs to be some element of horror.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I left the room, and in the hallway I started to think that, compared to the idiocy the two secretaries had described, a bank robbery wouldn’t be all that bad.

  Gold is worth more than life, I thought.

  How did I know this? I knew because at one time I’d been alive and witnessed it myself. But I needed to stop all my theorizing. The secretaries wanted to resurrect me, to bring me with them. I honestly didn’t feel a strong desire to breathe air again and see what was happening on the other side, but this idea about the power of literature had completely possessed me. Everything I’d written—two tiny books of poetry that no one read anymore—had ended up in local libraries. Writing that collected dust versus writing that resurrected the dead—there was no doubt about which I could get behind.

  I wrote day and night, nonstop. Tristesa and Zubrowka brought me food and drink, and periodically wiped the sweat from my brow. Thirty days later the moment of truth came. They sat at the table and read what I’d written. They glanced over conjunctions and pronouns, laughing all the while.

  “This is it!” they exclaimed. “Time for us to get going.”

  They jammed my manuscript into a box, secured it with duct tape, and placed it off to the side. I craned my neck to see if they had placed it in the “most valuable” box, but that one was already closed. As if all the best literature had already been written in the past, long before me. I found this annoying. Two tiny books of poetry, okay, but they were still significant. No matter their size.

  “Go into one of the rooms,” said Zubrowka. “You’re not allowed to leave until you feel a force, like a lasso, pulling you toward the door.”

  “Okay.”

  I holed up in the same room I’d been writing in. The chair was uncomfortable, but so was my life. And my death was uncomfortable too. I was used to discomfort.

  A great heat spread through the room, and I thought I might be burned alive along with my posthumous brainchild. I sat still, not expecting that what the secretaries had described would literally happen—but then I felt something tightening around my waist, binding my hands to my body and pulling me toward the door.

  My friend Sebastian appeared.

  “We’re going back among the living,” I said. “Can you believe it?”

  “Heraclitus says that immortals are mortal, and mortals immortal, because the life of one is the death of the other, and the death of one is the life of the other.”

  “Enough already with your Heraclitus!” I snapped.

  Sebastian regarded me with an offended look.

  “What a goose you are. How I wish I could’ve been Heraclitus’s imaginary friend instead of yours. You have no appreciation for delicacy. From an airplane one can see you’re from Bosnia.”

  Before I could respond, the door opened and I was sucked into the dark of the hallway. Above me spread blackness. I had no idea where I was. It seemed like I was emerging from a bottomless abyss.

  “Where are we?” I asked the person next to me. I couldn’t see faces in the dark.

  “I think we’re in Montenegro,” said a woman’s voice.

  Once my head was out, I looked around. I’d never been to Montenegro.

  “Durmitor,” someone called out.

  I was in the water. I saw Tristesa.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Devil’s Lake,” she said, laughing.

  A full moon shone down on us. I looked at my reflection on the lake’s surface. Naturally, I was a zombie. No one returns from death undamaged.

  “You could’ve warned me,” I said to Tristesa.

  “Why do you think zombies devour human brains?” she said. “It’s not like writers spend their lives obsessing over genitals or feet.”

  She was right, of course. The great invasion of undead writers began its hunt for the human brain. Everyone hurried to get out of the water. Somewhere ahead of me I spied the poet Njegoš.

  He would no doubt get the honor of the first bite, I thought, frustrated.

  Even the zombies, unfortunately, practiced etiquette and respected the hierarchy. I tried to make a fist, but my hand didn’t cooperate. The lasso still held me tight. Who was tugging the rope, who was steering me toward someone else’s brain—I never managed to find out.

  BURIED TREASURE

  1.

  The dead man was still lying there; tomorrow the mortician would come for him. In the meantime, they tried to calm his widow, a seasoned pill-popper, but soon gave up—the usual amount of drugs wasn’t working, and she flailed on the bed, visibly distressed.

  “Give her a larger dose,” the doctor said.

  The nurse read between the lines and gave her a fistful of pills. The widow then asked to be put in bed next to her deceased husband; she felt she was lying next to a living person. The grandchildren ran in and out of the room, ignoring their grandmother. Sometimes they’d pause to touch the corpse.

  “Maybe he’s really alive,” the eldest granddaughter said.

  The sour smell of the dead man’s urine emanated from the bedpan.

  The adults mourned, each in their own way, but the children had no time for grief. At that moment they were just beginning to discover sex, which, had the parents known, would’ve devastated them more than the grandfather’s death.

  The children didn’t care that the things Grandpa had left behind were meant for adults. They converted each of them into something useful: his books became a staircase for dolls, his medals were turned into coasters. But the fate of some wooden pencils he’d kept in a drawer was most interesting. Not long after his death, the eldest granddaughter came upon her cousin crouched behind one of the couches, poking at her genitals inquisitively with one of the pencils. Though the eldest was hardly surprised, she decided this tarnished pencil could no longer be used for writing or drawing. Furthermore, if her cousin had used one pencil in this way, perhaps she’d used the rest of them for her private fun as well. So part of Grandpa’s inheritance ended up in the trash. The parents weren’t pleased—thinking that the girls had thrown them away carelessly, they demanded the pencils be salvaged and returned to circulation. The children said nothing, even when someone in the household would anxiously nibble the end of a penc
il while composing an important letter.

  Once Grandma had recovered, she promptly returned to her old routines. She still hid pills in her underwear drawer, furtively stashed food among her winter hats, and let the children watch Twin Peaks, despite the fact that their parents had expressly forbidden it.

  In a rapid acceleration of their childhood, the grandchildren had learned about their grandfather’s scrotum when it had peeked through the leg of his briefs. But the funniest thing they’d ever seen was two floors down in the apartment of Nataša, a neighbor whose father was a big fan of pornography. A few visits to her place, and Grandfather’s “shame” was completely forgotten.

  Nataša’s father collected erotic comics and magazines, and she had a wooden horse the children would all take turns rocking on, in order to simulate the sexual activities of adults. They were quickly found out, and the entire porn collection ended up in an empty parking lot, tossed from the car like money to the poor from some affluent balcony. Nataša’s mother thereby ended a very pleasant spring, the likes of which they’d never experience again. Despite this, the children continued to observe strange things, things that made Twin Peaks look like no big deal. They became especially attuned to secrets. Everything that was hidden, the children wanted to unearth. They couldn’t stand whenever the adults would lie, even though they themselves lied gratuitously. But the most important thing was that they were still naive. If they hadn’t been, nothing that happened that summer would have been possible.

  2.

  When Grandma finally stopped crying for Grandpa and stockpiling trash and pills around the house, the children set off with her and their uncle for summer holidays in Smoluca, the village where Grandma had been born and raised. When they arrived, Uncle immediately relocated from the driver’s seat to a bench under a walnut tree, opened a beer, and gazed at the hillside in front of the cottage. The children, three young girls desperate to know everything, surrounded him. Uncle took big gulps.

  “Will you take a bath in a barrel later?” asked the children.

  “Of course,” said Uncle.

  Their cousins were supposed to arrive at the neighboring cottage the same day. As soon as they got there, everyone would climb trees and pelt each other with unripe fruit, especially plums. Uncle would help them draw thin, twisted mustaches on their faces. They’d steal corn from the nearby fields and blame the village children. The eldest cousin would probably eat too much of the green fruit and corn and, just like last year, spend two hours holed up in the outhouse. The children would laugh and laugh, offering her a fresh roll of toilet paper along with their disgust. Everything would be business as usual.

  “The well’s dried up!” they heard Grandma shouting from the bottom of the hill. “There’s not a drop of water.”

  Uncle kept drinking his beer; he wasn’t too worried. He was already wishing he’d stayed home, camped out in front of the television.

  “There’s no water? My god, there are worse things,” he said to the children.

  Every summer Uncle would tell them, “At the base of the hill, near the well, there’s treasure buried, huge pots of gold. When the aliens come to abduct me, I’m going to dig them up and bring them to Mars.”

  “Don’t forget the beer,” Grandma would quip, but Uncle would pay her no mind.

  “Why don’t we dig them up right now?” the children would ask, curious.

  “Because it’s not the right time,” Uncle would say.

  The children believed him because back home he had a sizable collection of Arka, a magazine dedicated to all things supernatural—UFOs, witches, mermaids, ghosts—which the children would regularly read. From time to time, the children would also find porn he’d hidden in album sleeves. They couldn’t understand why he put them there, why he hid them.

  “Grandma, Grandma, where did this come from?” the grandchildren had asked one time.

  Grandma, who would come over to tidy up Uncle’s apartment, had supplied a quick answer.

  “Your grandpa found those in the hallway a while back, and brought them over for cleaning the windows.”

  The children were naive, but they weren’t stupid. Obviously Grandma was hiding something. Soon after that, the next time they went to Uncle’s place, the dirty magazines were no longer among the records, but the issues of Arka remained in their usual place. To the children, nothing made sense; the pictures they saw in Arka were stranger than the ones in the magazines Uncle allegedly used to clean the windows, but nevertheless, they hadn’t been removed.

  Grandma slowly began making her way back uphill to the cottage. Uncle watched her with a smile.

  “How will you take a bath in a barrel if there’s no water?” the children asked him.

  “I’ll bring the barrel home,” Uncle replied, and kept drinking.

  “We need to call on Zoran,” Grandma said. “This well is done for.”

  “Why not take the kids to see him?” Uncle asked as he finished his beer and opened up another. “The car can’t make it up such a steep slope. You can all go for a walk in the woods.”

  Grandma looked at him but didn’t say anything. She turned to the grandchildren and asked, “Want to go for a walk with me?”

  “We’d rather go with Uncle,” they replied.

  Grandma kissed their foreheads, fixed her gaze on her son again, and said calmly, “Tell Zoran to hurry. This is already the third well that’s dried up. Your sister doesn’t have any water, either.”

  Uncle rose reluctantly from the bench and put on the T-shirt he’d taken off only minutes before due to the July heat.

  “Maybe the car could make it to Zoran’s house. The climb isn’t all that steep,” he said.

  3.

  The children bounced around in the backseat. It was sweltering, and their bare legs stuck to the vinyl upholstery. This was before the internet, so they couldn’t complain to their friends about how hot and miserable it was. Uncle grumbled to himself. He was a bachelor, and Grandma was trying to get him to drive her to the country every weekend. He hated going to Smoluca, and he hated his mother.

  “We could still go swimming in the creek,” said one of the grandchildren.

  “We could,” said Uncle. “We could, but we won’t.”

  They stopped halfway up the hill, when Uncle could barely inch the car any further. The children loved to ride with the parking brake up; it was fun to watch Uncle struggle to get the car to the top. They finally arrived at Zoran’s house to find hens and geese darting around out front. A dog was chained up and barking furiously.

  “Stay in the car,” said Uncle. “I’ll be quick.”

  Zoran’s house had a dirt floor. The hens were free to wander inside. Two mangy, lethargic cats sprawled by the front door. Uncle had to step over them. At the table, with a bottle of beer, sat Zoran. He stared absently out a small window.

  “Hi there, Zoran,” said Uncle.

  “Hey,” replied Zoran. “What brings you here?”

  “Our well’s dried up.”

  “Figures, there’s a big drought.”

  “We need to drill a new one, someplace where there’s no problem with the water. Though it’s all the same to me. With or without water, I’m cursed with a bitchy old lady.”

  “Don’t talk that way about your mother,” said Zoran.

  He didn’t sound convincing.

  “The old broad gets on everyone’s nerves. She drives my sister nuts too. All she does is pop pills, hoard trash, and nag us. She’s been unbearable since Dad died.”

  Zoran fixed Uncle with a questioning look.

  “Sometimes it’s a blessing to lose a parent,” he said.

  Uncle seemed not to hear him. He studied his beer bottle.

  “You want another?” asked the well digger.

  “Sure.”

  Zoran turned to the refrigerator behind him.

  “You have a lot of work these days?” asked Uncle.

  “Yeah, but I can take a look at the problem tomorrow.”
<
br />   “Great,” said Uncle, gulping his beer for the hundredth time.

  Meanwhile, the children, of course, hadn’t listened to their uncle, and leaped from the car. The geese were angry, and one chased them around the yard. The girls bounded, out of breath, into Zoran’s doorway. The cats ran for cover. The dog wouldn’t stop barking.

  “These are your beautiful nieces?” Zoran asked Uncle.

  “Yes, our three treasures,” replied Uncle. “And my eldest sister has two sons and a daughter. They’re just wonderful,” he added.

  The girls looked at Zoran. It seemed to them they’d seen his face somewhere. But they couldn’t stand his laugh. It evoked, one of the girls would recall later, a forest monster they’d read about in an issue of Arka. The monster who’d drag you to the depths of the icy lake when you sat staring at your reflection. Before, they hadn’t known the monster’s name, but when they set their eyes on the well digger, it dawned on them. The monster was called Zoran and had emerged from the forest. He no longer needed the lake.

  4.

  “Eight hundred marks minimum?” Grandma said when they got back.

  “That’s what Zoran said,” Uncle replied. “He said it’s not worth digging down less than eight meters, and considering that a lot of the wells around here have dried up, he’d definitely need to go twice as deep.”

  “It strikes me as odd that he has so much work, but lives so poorly. What does he spend all that money on?”

  Uncle said nothing. He wiped his forehead with his hand—he was soaked in sweat.

  The children went over to their aunt’s house and sat on the stairs. They were waiting for their cousins to arrive and their aunt to bring cake. Grandma had to watch her sugar and no longer baked cakes or pies, to the great dismay of her grandchildren. The girls flung stones at the dusty road.

  “What do you think Uncle’s treasure is like?” asked one of them.

  “Big!” replied the youngest one.

  She indicated the exact size with her hands.

  “From here to the moon!” she added.

  “It must be full of gold,” the eldest one concluded, continuing to daydream.