And then all at once she had to pee. In the last few weeks she’d been peeing every half hour. She didn’t know whether this was somehow connected to being pregnant or whether she had an infected bladder. She thought about getting up and going over to the toilet bowl, but she got cold at the mere thought of getting out of the water and stepping on the cold tiles with her bare feet. She realized that it didn’t matter at all whether she peed in the bathtub if she was only going to slit her wrists afterward anyway. She let water mix with water and took a little pleasure in her empty bladder and the mild shudder that comes when one finally pees after a long wait. She stretched her legs out over the edge of the tub, and the pain in her knees gave way to a new feeling of comfort.
When enough time had passed for the tips of her fingers to shrivel, she remembered the razor blades. She grabbed the little packet, began to open it up, and all of a sudden she felt sorry about interrupting all of this. Why should she cut short the moments of her pleasure on account of a life that had no meaning? Everything was good now, and she could end the suffering easily when it appeared again. And she knew that it would, but that didn’t make her unhappy. How could she be unhappy when everything she saw and heard now was so nice? Except her legs, which were before her eyes. They too would have been pretty if it weren’t for the hairs all over them. They had grown since last autumn and now resembled those ugly and greasy hanks of hair that bald men comb across their heads. If she put her legs down in the tub, she wouldn’t see them, but then the pain in her knees would come back. She stretched up and took Vid’s razor out from behind the mirror. She unwrapped a razor blade and put it into the razor. She stopped, hesitated a little, and took Vid’s shaving cream. On this occasion that seemed more elegant than ordinary soap. She sprayed her left shin. The thick foam looked like snow and smelled like pine trees. Men shave every day and that thought never occurs to them. Too bad, because it’s nice. Snow that smells like pine in a can of shaving cream. She spread the shaving cream along her legs and drew the razor from her foot toward her knee. White and clean skin was exposed, without a single blemish or any blood. She sincerely admired her left leg, as if it belonged to someone else or as if it weren’t a leg at all but, like the snow with the scent of pine, the work of a good magician. She carefully passed the razor along her leg and watched it become younger and younger. Then she began shaving her right leg, which became just as beautiful, but Dijana was still disappointed. People get used to things quickly, and there’s no beauty that won’t disappoint you a little the second time you see it.
After she finished shaving her right lower leg, she took a look at her arms. Little black hairs had also grown on them, it was true, not like on her legs, but these were also worth some effort and pleasure. She shaved her left forearm and then cut herself a little on her right. But it wasn’t anything terrible. The pleasure was stronger than the blood.
Then she gave a deep sigh; would this be the end of an adventure that had brought only happiness? She wanted to prolong the journey through the newly discovered white spaces at any price. With the tip of her big toe she pulled out the plug. The water drained out of the tub, quietly at first, and then with a gurgling sound. When half of it had drained out, Dijana again reached toward the mirror and took the little nail scissors. She sat in the empty tub and for the first time in her life cut her pubic hair, which, as they say, covers one’s shame.
Her heart beat from excitement, and she felt as if she weren’t yet fifteen years old. Too bad you can’t remember many things you might do for the first time in your life and that aren’t suicide, she thought. She shook the can of shaving cream, sighed deeply again, closed her eyes, and pressed the lever. Although the foam was soft and light and she would hardly have felt it on her arms and legs, the very touch of it shocked Dijana. The hairs evidently protected the delicate sense of touch of that part of the body. Slowly, with a great deal of attention, pleasure, and caution, she drew the razor across her mons veneris and the neighboring depressions, hillocks, and volcanoes, trying to take as long as possible and, when the end came, to know well that she had thought about the end long enough not to yearn for it.
With virginal fear she lowered her fingers and then her palm onto her mons veneris. That was the sweetest touch of a body that she’d ever felt because it was simultaneously hers and someone else’s. Then, without much worry, she remembered Vid and the fact that she would somehow have to explain this change to him when he returned from his trip through Bosnia. He’d departed ten days before, at a time when the briefings by the medical council had been full of optimism, and she still hadn’t known that she was pregnant. Thinking of that meant a return to life outside the bathtub, a return that had ceased to be chronically depressing and had become healthily malicious.
Vid was supposed to come back late Sunday night with finished photographs of Banja Vrućica near Teslić, which together with pictures and texts on ten or so other spas for rheumatic diseases in Bosnia were to be part of a guidebook for the Adriatic. It would be published in ten European languages and would be used to attract aging, gouty, and tubercular tourists (especially rich ones) to special two-part packages: first, two weeks of therapy in one of the Bosnian spas, whereupon they would leave for a week of sea adventures. Banja Vrućica was the sixth or seventh place in which over the last year Vid Kraljev had stayed for three weeks as an assistant photographer to Petar Pardžik, the famed Belgrade artistic and personal photographer of all Yugoslav rulers from Petar I Karađorđević the Unifier to Marshal Tito. He’d taken on this project at a request and on an order from the highest leaders of the Bosnian Communist Party, who were convinced that Pardžik was the only one who could photograph those spas and hospitals so that they would look attractive to Krauts. And maybe he would lend them some of the old Habsburg imperial and royal charm and produce portraits of the buildings that made them look almost like marshals and field marshals. Kraljev had been assigned to him as the most promising young Yugoslav photographer, the winner of federal photography competitions, to which he had submitted some enlarged photographs of sea crabs whose legs and pincers looked like menacing science fiction abstractions or towers and giant fossils. But special significance, which was probably even crucial for Kraljev’s fame, was lent to all this by the fact that he titled all his photographs with names and key places from the war of national liberation and the socialist revolution, such as The Battle for the Wounded or Shots from Ljubo’s Grave. But Pardžik didn’t need an assistant, and Vid Kraljev couldn’t ever be one to anybody. The old man spent whole days complaining of his illnesses and going through brightly colored pills on his palm, rearranging them and dividing them up, lining them up into colorful rows, and developing a theory according to which it wasn’t good for heart pills to be blue and bladder and prostate pills to be green.
“Someone must have taken this into account,” he said. “It would be hard for someone to believe that a green pill would make them pee. That’s like reducing a fever with red pills. Damn, they could only cure people with Daltonism! It’s like graphic artists are condemned to die as soon as they fall ill! Haven’t you thought about that? Of course not; I’m not surprised. You’re young. Your time to think about it will come.”
That’s how the old master philosophized as Vid lugged cameras and tripods behind him. Loaded up like a mule, he thought about simply strolling off some afternoon during Pardžik’s break and going to the bus station, buying a ticket, and leaving the old man alone to occupy himself with the only thing that interested him, for which he needed neither cameras nor tripods. He would have done that on the first trip, when they were supposed to photograph the spa in Kladanj, but he was afraid that in the best case his desertion would get him banned from exhibitions, if they didn’t simply arrest him for sabotage.
Every other day Comrade Fejzić called from the Bosnian Central Committee and inquired about how the work was going. Pardžik left the conversations with him to Vid. And he lied, saying that at that moment Comrade Petar wa
s touring the locations, waiting for the morning or afternoon light to illuminate the building, or he would think up something unbelievably stupid—say, that the old man was carrying out a technical inspection of the lenses or that he was coordinating the plan and the alternative plan, which made Fejzić particularly enthusiastic.
“Keep up the good work,” he would say. “The working people and citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be grateful to you.”
At first Vid thought that Fejzić was bullshitting them, but then he realized with horror that the man was deadly serious and that the gratitude of the working people and citizens was really a kind of threat about what would happen if the work weren’t completed in the best manner possible. And that threat concerned him alone, and not Petar Pardžik, the respected artist and hero of socialist labor who was already above suspicion because of his age and prior achievements, whereas Vid, a youngish forty-year-old assistant, still had to prove himself and might very well die trying.
“Why don’t you quit?” he asked Pardžik after he had spent the sixth day walking hunched over because he had pinched a nerve between two vertebrae.
“Quit what, my dear man? This isn’t work that you just quit! You’d better understand that while there’s still time. When you photograph some bigwig for the first time, you think you’ve torn a star from the sky. Do you know what an honor it was for me in 1913 when I was invited to the Royal Palace to photograph His Majesty Petar? And I had no idea what it meant. I got out of the poorhouse for the rest of my life, and they fucked me good. Both at the same time. I’ve always been able to wear nice suits, I could afford the best restaurants, I went to Paris every year and was never broke, but I couldn’t ever turn them down after I photographed the first one. What would have happened to me if I had said ‘No’ when they asked me to take the first pictures of Aleksandar Karađorđević as the new king? I’d have ended up doing hard labor, my good man! Or if afterward I’d refused to photograph General Pero Živković, his family, and their dog? God, I even had to take portraits of that idiot’s dog. Please, taking pictures of dogs is the worst humiliation a photographer can suffer because you have to make an unbelievable fool of yourself to get a dog to pose for you. It’s hard to be a fool and be famous. It’s better to be just a fool. Later I photographed General Nedić, and Dimitrije Ljotić and the Germans, and I would have taken Uncle Draža’s picture if I hadn’t hidden from his agents. God, why would I go to Ravna Gora just to get killed on the way? Oh, if they’d kept me there a few years! And I knew that Draža didn’t have a chance and wouldn’t come around and ask, ‘Well now, Pero, why didn’t you want to take my picture? Am I really the only ugly one around here, goddammit?’ Uncle Draža was naïve, but I’d better be quiet about that. Well, and then it was ’45. Could I refuse Tito? I could have; of course, then I’d have been able to choose whether to be hanged or shot. It’s just that his little toadies reproduced like amoebas. Six republics, at least twenty Tito wannabees in each republic, so my job was to make my way from Triglav to Đevđelija and take pictures of everyone. Fuck them! And the very next year they’re replaced, and I have to take pictures of the new ones. Don’t think I’m for the king; I don’t give a fuck about him or the monarchy, but then it was clear how many there were who could come tell Petar Pardžik, ‘Hey, Pero, come take a picture of this genius!’ Besides the king there was only the head of the government and Prince Paul and maybe someone else in extraordinary circumstances. But under Tito they were countless. In ’50-something they ordered me to photograph our soccer team that beat the Russians in Finland. Krcun, the minister of the police, came and ordered me to do it, and I said to him: How can I photograph a bunch of clods kicking a ball back and forth across a field, who live out their lives doing nothing? And do you know what Krcun said to me? He said, ‘Well now, comrade, would you photograph the Russians if they’d won?’ What could I do? I photographed them too. If I hadn’t, I’d have ended up on Goli Otok. And the same thing now. They got me out of bed to photograph this Bosnian shit, and I just said, ‘Yessir!’ But you didn’t have to. If you’d said you don’t know how, that you don’t have enough experience, that you’re stupid or a jerk, they’d leave you alone and wouldn’t ever call you again. But now it’s all over. You’re in the machine, and there’s no way out. But it’ll be easier for you when the greenbacks rustle under your nose. Then you’ll forget and you won’t know what you did, until they call you up the next time. And then you’ll suffer some again. First the pleasure and then the pain. That’s the way this work is. That’s the way life is. First the pleasure and then the pain. Only I don’t have time for pleasure any more. There you have it. I won’t have time to spend my money. I got screwed early in the game! But Uncle Pero will show them something from the grave! When they drive me on a caisson down the Boulevard of Titans, I’ll know that it’s over. No more ‘Take a picture of this guy, take a picture of that guy.’”
And so Vid had been lugging the equipment from one end of the spa to another for days, listening to Pardžik’s stories about the distant past and his laments over pills, without the old photographer taking a single picture. Only on the day before they left or the day they were traveling would Petar Pardžik take about twenty hasty shots without any special preparations and regardless of the angle of the morning or afternoon shadows, without even switching cameras or lenses. Later the comrades on the committees and tourist associations would admire his genius, and the newspapers would run reviews of those photographs in their culture sections, which were written by eminent Yugoslav authorities on artistic photography, art historians, and university professors of esthetics, although those photographs differed in no way from dilettantish photographs taken by rheumatic retirees passing the time between therapies in the spas. It had been a long time since the old man had actually been a photographer, and he’d had enough of art since the time he’d photographed General Pero Živković. He knew all this and wasn’t afraid of others finding it out too. He showed Vid Kraljev what the passions of youth turn into and what happens to artists who gain the admiration of kings. It could even be said that there was an unusual relish in Pardžik’s disclosure of all of this. He had no interest in teaching the young, forty-year-old man about life; he wouldn’t have done it if Vid had been half as old, nor was it important to him that Vid avoid his fate. He made his confession only as a small act of vengeance on everyone, from Petar I the Unifier to Marshal Tito, including his own positive critics, who took away his belief that photography was a miracle because it showed the naked truth of the eye.
“We could do something today,” he told Vid over breakfast in Banja Vrućica, early in the morning on Sunday, the fourth of May, 1980.
“It’s not that we could—we have to,” Vid answered nervously.
“And why would anyone, if you’ll excuse me, have to do anything but die?” Pardžik asked, taking a pinch of salt and entertaining himself as he imagined a Siberian snowstorm hitting the top of his hardboiled egg. He was salting it for the third time, and the scene was magnificent.
“You’ll die if you salt things so much,” Vid said caustically, already on the verge of losing his temper because they were traveling that day and Pardžik still hadn’t photographed anything.
“Who says I’m going to eat this egg? Ha, I’m not! Pera Pardžik doesn’t eat what he admires. You know, I admire this egg here. Not just any egg, but this one. That means I’m an artist. Artists can tell one egg from another. You, if you’re nervous, can go ahead and take a walk and look at the women. Maybe a young one will catch your eye. Leave me alone. When I’m ready, I’ll find you. If I’m ready. The little time I have left I want to spend as I see fit, and I advise you to do the same. There’s nowhere to hurry off to. Believe me. Nowhere.”
He spoke with his head lowered all the way down to the tabletop, so he could get the best view possible of the salt falling onto the egg and the patterns the crystals were forming. He wasn’t quite satisfied because his thumb, index finger, and middle finger
hadn’t completely mastered the technique of a salt blizzard, and it all resembled somewhat the way artificial snow fell in American movies of the ’40s. But he was certain that he would succeed in the end and get the egg perfectly salted that day. Rage and pity mingled within Vid. Without caring if everyone in the dining hall was gazing at him, the old man, his cheek propped on the table and his right hand raised high to release the salt, reminded one of a child at play, unaware that if he continued what he was doing, he might get a slap.
“Okay, so we still don’t know when we’re going to take the photos?” Vid asked.
“Bull’s-eye! You got it, my young colleague. We still don’t know anything,” Pardžik said, trying to spread drifts and accumulations of salt on the egg.
“Fine; I’m going to go read the newspaper,” Vid said, rose from the table, and started toward the television lounge. Then he changed his mind and decided at first to go to the reception desk, to call Dijana and tell her that he had no idea when they were going to leave Banja Vrućica but that it wasn’t likely that they would arrive before the next day. These last days she’d sounded strange when they talked on the phone. And he couldn’t get that out of his head. He wasn’t sure about whether she really loved him in the first place, and these Bosnian trips, he thought, were only helping to cool what in Dijana had never been as hot as what was in him. He’d been crawling after her for almost twenty years, and each spring and fall he proposed to her. He was her friend and someone whom she didn’t call on the phone and avoided in the city. He’d changed jobs and professions for Dijana, and in the end stayed with photography. Either because she really liked artists or because she was already slowly entering that phase of life when it didn’t matter what her men did.
She’d rushed into his arms in the late summer of 1978, after a season she’d spent bedridden with pneumonia and that low-grade fever that they say is in some cases a symptom of insanity but in three months will drive even the most normal woman insane. She was dead tired. He took her out for a first stroll. She was continually sweating and her every muscle ached. Half an hour later she begged Vid to take her back home, grabbed him under the arm and clung to him, and realized that there were no real reasons for having rejected him all those years because in any case the most important thing in life was to have someone who will take you and put you in bed when you’re ill and you can’t do it on your own.
The Walnut Mansion Page 10
