Till Kingdom Come

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  ANDREJ NIKOLAIDIS

  TILL KINGDOM COME

  Translated from the Montenegrin by Will Firth

  My gentle mother cannot return.

  Paul Celan

  First published in 2015 by

  Istros Books

  London, United Kingdom

  www.istrosbooks.com

  © Andrej Nikolaidis, 2015

  The right of Andrej Nikolaidis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  Translation © Will Firth, 2015

  Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak | www.frontispis.hr

  ISBN:

  978-1-908236-78-4 (eBook)

  978-1-908236-241 (print edition)

  This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

  PROLOGUE: WATER

  I think I remember how it all began.

  The world was soaking wet like a sponge. By the time February came around, the earth couldn’t take another drop.

  The winter was unusually mild that year. But it dragged on, as can happen by the Mediterranean, until it swallowed the Spring like an Aesculapian snake eats an egg. The rain poured down day after day, for months. Soon it was half a year. The sardine season was almost over, but people still only went out if they had to, and only in their raincoats. The fishermen gathered every morning in their little cafés by the shore, where everything stinks of fish and seaweed, ready to drink their espresso and head out before dawn as usual. As if the old reality would come back if they held on to their little rituals for long enough. They sat in silence, scrying their coffee sludge, like the last survivors of an exterminated tribe that still doesn’t understand why its world has disappeared. They listened in vain to the weather forecast, as bleak as a pagan mass. There was no good news: the rain wouldn’t stop, the sea wouldn’t drop, and they wouldn’t be heading out. The men whose families depended on the catch despaired and drank glass after glass of grappa. In March, only the most persistent went after shad and then vainly stood in the rain trying to sell their fish to non-existent customers. The prawn season, the most profitable of the year, was delayed at first, and then it became clear that it wouldn’t take place at all. Even if they had managed to head out, risking their necks in the waves that broke with a roar in the shallow water of the bay, it would have been a pointless effort. The sea was icy cold – just 12 degrees – although May was drawing on. Prawns only come with the warmer currents. They herald the beach tourists, but they wouldn’t be coming either, it seemed. The nature that people knew, whose unwritten laws they thought they could rely on, had betrayed them. The things they considered certain failed to occur. What no one in their families had any memory of, and therefore couldn’t tell them about, had now happened. The most dogged of the fishermen kept setting their alarm clocks so they could get up at night and tip the water out of their boats, which would fill again even before they made it back to their beds. The others let their vessels sink. When all this finally passed, they would pull them up onto the shore and their skilful hands would clean, repair and re-float them.

  Once, out of curiosity, I went down to the marina at three in the morning. I wrapped myself in my raincoat, opened the parasol I had taken from a burglarized storeroom at the beach and sat down on a bench. I opened a bottle of Vat 69 and watched the boats lying at the bottom of the bay for hours. That’s what the Ulcinj pirates’ fleet must have looked like after it was sunk by the Sultan’s navy at the entrance to nearby Valdanos Bay. I thought that same, vacuous thought again and again, vainly trying to think of some other words, until I finished the whisky and threw the empty bottle into the sea. Only then was I able to free myself of the thought of the corsairs’ sunken ships. Whoever finds my bottle will get the message: I wanted to say that I have nothing to say. I trudged home, took the basins of rainwater off the bed and slept through until the next evening. It seemed to me, when I finally opened my eyes, that the rain was beating down as if it intended to flatten everything beneath it.

  If you wanted to go outside, gumboots were the only suitable footwear. But they were no good now either because the water was getting faster and deeper. In the end, wherever you went, you arrived wet up to the waist. The foundations of the houses absorbed the damp, and before the eyes of the tenants it climbed the walls towards the ceiling. Everything we touched was water. We slept on wet sheets under cold, clammy covers. The floorboards were swollen to bursting point. Parquet flooring buckled like the ground after mighty tectonic shifts, such as shook the Earth in pre-human eons. The contours of the floor changed from day to day. Windows, even those with heavy shutters, were no help against the rain. It came with a wild westerly one moment and with a sirocco the next, constantly changed the angle at which it fell, attacking now frontally, now from the side, until it had crept through every invisible opening in the walls and woodwork. In their rooms, people made barriers of towels and babies’ nappies beneath the windows. When they were sodden, they would be wrung out in the bathroom and quickly returned to the improvised dykes.

  Roofs let through water like a poorly controlled national border. Like in a bizarre game of chess, families pulled pots and pans across the floor: Casserole to f3, frying pan to d2. The whole town suffered from sleep deprivation. Everyone finally understood the terrible power of Chinese water torture: the beast dripped all night and drove everyone out of their wits. Some tried to protect themselves from the sound of the drops that fell louder than bombs by stuffing cotton wool in their ears. When even that didn’t help, they would turn on their televisions, radios and computers, trying to make noise to block out the monstrous aquatic symphony. Those who had small children would find brief salvation in the children’s crying. No one attempted to calm them. They screamed with hunger, fever or colic, but their parents made no attempt to feed them or lull them to sleep. Mothers later recounted guiltily that they had hoped and prayed the crying would go on forever. In the end, the children did tire and fall asleep, and the parents would again be at the mercy of the sound that tormented them. That winter, children learned that crying is useless because no one will help us. And parents learned the lesson that everyone who tries to find salvation in procreation realizes sooner or later: that the children will betray us, just as we betray them.

  Ultimately, everyone gave up the struggle. Those who would never have lain in bed and gazed at the ceiling now sat and smoked all night, staring vacantly and watching the containers on the floor fill ever quicker, until they decided it was time to stop emptying them.

  The Winter firewood was already used up, and going out to gather new wood in such a gale made no sense. The stove would only smoke, producing no heat, and there were no prospects of it drying the rooms, let alone the walls, where the rising damp was puckering the plaster.

  The alleyways ran like rivers. We would long ago have been inundated if the town was not built on a hill. The storm-water drainage became clogged before the New Year. The Central Canal gave way in the middle of April.

  Now what we called the Central Canal is an interesting thing: it had not actually been dug for the passage of water. The people of Ulcinj originally made that tunnel because of a different enemy - one of flesh and blood. It led from the old fortress by the shore to half a kilometre inland, all the way to today’s promenade, where you find one boutique after another with second-rate Italian wares and jewellers peddling trinkets from Turkey.

  At first, the tunnel served for the rapid evacuation of t
he residents of Kalaja, the fortified Old Town of Ulcinj, who, it should be said, were pirates. They had the custom of plundering Venetian cities, and it seems they particularly liked attacking Perast, a small, wealthy town in the Bay of Kotor, which was practically defenceless because its menfolk were valued mariners in the fleet of La Serenissima and thus were constantly sul viaggio. Therefore, from time to time the Doge would send the fleet to Ulcinj to take revenge. The Ulcinj pirates evidently considered a good plan of withdrawal no less valuable than a wise plan of attack: the secret tunnel they dug allowed them to flee from the superior Venetian forces. We can just imagine the bewildered Venetian soldiers wandering through the eerily empty Kalaja, where they were met only by starving dogs and seagulls. There was no trace of the corsairs because they had already reached the swamp in the town’s hinterland. They made their way through the water lilies and reeds in small, fast rowboats, rushing to Velika Plaža beach, where their ships lay hidden. From there, they would embark and launch a counter-attack. With a bit of luck, they would be able to approach the Venetian fleet from behind, while the infidels were still in the fortress, busy with plundering and getting drunk. If the Venetians had already left, never mind: the pirates were still alive, and what had been burnt and stolen they would plunder back again, inshallah. Today we’d say: the main thing is that merchandise changes hands and capital circulates.

  People I knew told me that the tunnel was wide enough for a VW Golf to pass through it. I never tested the claim: probably because of the disdain I feel for empirical proof

  In any other town, a pirates’ escape tunnel would be a tourist attraction. The fact that it was left to become a drain should not be ascribed to a conscious plan of the local authorities, but to their negligence – a unique blend of idleness, impudence and fanaticism – which is interpreted here as consistent non-interference in God’s will and His competencies. When Communism collapsed, the local population rediscovered God and started flocking to the mosques, and it became common to complain about dysfunctional municipal services at the local council and for staff to reply that the heap of rubbish that lay stinking in front of your house was there because God wanted it to be:

  “If He wanted us to remove the dead horse from your parking slot, we would already have done it,” an official told me once.

  “If who wanted you to?” I asked nervously.

  “Out, get out!” he shouted.

  As I hurried away down the corridor, fearing that I had involuntarily experienced proof once again that dialogue is the most overrated thing in the world, I heard the fellow banging the drawers of his desk and repeating to himself: “If who? Whaddaya mean If who??”

  Searching for a path, the water found the tunnel – it was as simple as that. And then it worked its way out of the tunnel: it breached the fifty-metre tall Cyclopean walls of the Old Town and, true to Kant’s definition of the sublime as beauty we experience as fearful, surged into the sea in a mighty torrent.

  It may have been a state of emergency, but there was no lack of alcohol in the shops and the black-market cigarette trade still flourished. In Sulyo’s crummy shop, where everything was twice as expensive as elsewhere, I was the only buyer anyway. When some local informed me that Sulyo’s stocks of Rubin white wine, brandy and Johnny Walker were, if not inexhaustible, then at least sufficient for me to drink for another year of floods, all cause for concern disappeared from my mind. I kept buying my cigarettes via the Tadić delivery system: you call them at any hour of the day or night, and the Tadićs bring you a carton of cigarettes within half an hour. The combined IQ of all the Tadićs did not exceed 200, but they had certainly organized a proper little family business: the father sold cigarettes at the market, while his sons darted about town on rattletrap Vespas, delivering them to bars and houses.

  “For every four cartons you got a free Coca-Cola,” the youngest Tadić told me one evening around midnight as he slugged a litre bottle into my hand.

  “Listen,” I said to him, “I see you got the idea of the free Cola from pizza delivery services, but if you think about it you would realise how absurd it is. Cola may go with pizza, but with cigarettes you need alcohol or coffee.”

  He looked at me bluntly through the streams of sweat running down his face. He was computing inside.

  “We can’t give away liquor. That wouldn’t pay off,” he told me after a pause for computation that seemed as long as the Peloponnesian, Hundred Years’, Guatemalan, and all the Punic wars put together.

  “Alright, but how about a hundred grams of coffee?”

  “Yeah, that would work,” he beamed.

  “There you go! Do it like that from now on. But I’ll keep the Cola all the same – it goes with whisky.”

  * * *

  Now that I was provisioned with everything an honourable man could need, I gladly accepted Maria’s invitation to go to Bojana River for the May-Day holidays. That was typical of her and part of her charm that I found so irresistible: she thought it was perfectly natural and normal to leave a flood-stricken town and go to where there is even more water, just for a change of scene.

  She, Goran and Radovan woke me before dawn, bursting into the house like a SWAT unit. Even before I could open my eyes, Maria was rummaging loudly in the kitchen trying to find a vessel to make coffee in, while the other two attacked what was left of last night’s Vecchia.

  “Come on, get this into you,” Radovan passed me a glass of alcohol. “You know what they say: you have to fight fire with fire.”

  Then Maria arrived with coffee in a Teflon frying pan.

  “You don’t have any detergent, and this was the only thing that was clean.”

  Goran found glasses beneath the armchair and the bed, and Maria ladled the coffee into them.

  “The three-day rule applies here,” he said.

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “The same as the three-second rule: what’s been on the floor for less than three seconds or longer than three days isn’t dirty and you can eat and drink out of it,” was his reply.

  Radovan came from some God-forsaken place in the Krajina borderlands. He claimed he was a close relative of a well-known Bosnian Serb folk-singer. Having a nationalist bard like that in the family opened many doors for him here. That’s the kind of time it was. Montenegrin ethno-fascism was comparable with the German variety in terms of its intensity. Its relative lack of coherence and effectiveness at killing can be put down to Montenegrins’ legendary laziness and incompetence in organization.

  Radovan brought his wife, children and mother with him. His daughters were spectacularly ugly – prime specimens of negative natural selection – but they were not nearly as shocking as his wife. Even the budget of an average Hollywood movie would not have been enough to rectify her appearance. Such disfigurement is a rarity, even in the history of literature. At first she reminded me of one of Tolkien’s orcs, but later I realized what ought to have been obvious all along: that God created the woman not in his own likeness, but in that of Dorian Gray.

  Radovan claimed to be a talented cook and even to have healing hands. There was no one who believed it and gave him a job, so he just used his hands for lifting bottles of beer, and he was able to fit more amber fluid in his small body than the laws of physics allowed, I can vouch for that. He was a first-rate liar and intelligent enough to know that you can always rely on people’s greed. He found business partners in cafés and bars, where he would booze with them until the small hours. Then, when they were drunk enough, he would ply them with the bizarrest of ‘business plans’ and ardently describe ‘investment opportunities’ until they took the bait and turned their pockets inside out for him. The way Radovan conducted his business did not differ substantially from the functionings of global financial capitalism, which is a euphemism for the Ponzi scheme. The Radovan scheme differed from the Ponzi scheme only in so far as Radovan never paid a single instalment to anyo
ne – not one cent of profit. Since I was interested in psychoanalysis, I understood that Radovan could be said to be part of real-existing financial capitalism. He never paid any dividends as an enticement for further investment, which would mean greater losses in the long-run, and there was no false hope in making gains – as soon as you gave money to Radovan, you knew you’d get fuck-all back. You could even say that his dealings were closer to The Truth than those of large financial institutions are, and thus closer to Virtue. But there were few who appreciated that, and every now and again he would be beaten up by one of those to whom he had caused grief. But what can you do – everywhere and at all times, people are passionately intolerant of the Truth.

  Goran also gave him money several times. Not out of greed, which he had been cured of, but out of a compassion and kindness that probably only still exist in Russian novels. How many times did I tell him, Don’t do it, you know he won’t give it back, you know you’re throwing your money out the window. But Goran would just shrug his shoulders, smile and say, He needs it more than I do.

  Goran was my best and perhaps my only true friend. He lived with his father, a tyrant who first drove Goran’s mother out of his kingdom and into her grave, and then pushed his sister into voluntary exile at the age of seventeen. Fleeing head-over-heels from her father, she married the first good-looking, sweet-talking man she met. He would turn out to be the same as her father; but before she realized her mistake, she already had two children, and there was no escape for her any more. Hiding her misery from her husband, she would meet with Goran; she lamented to him, cried and said she’d kill herself then always went back home because she had to feed the children.

  Goran worked as a waiter during the day, and at night he went out to sea to try and catch fish to sell so he could put some money his sister’s way. Now and then he would rebalance his and his sister’s budget by selling the odd matchbox full of grass he’d got from Albania. Goran dealt with the best of intentions, like everything else he did. He spent his free time with me. I couldn’t help him – I was never able to help anybody. We drank, told each other intimate things, and then parted, taking all our own misfortunes away with us again. I would watch him from the terrace as he headed away down the path with a light step. He had a proud, dignified bearing that suited him like height suits a cypress.