Till Kingdom Come

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  Time therefore became secularized. It would no longer flow to the cadence of divine service but to the rhythms of production and transaction. The merchant who travels in order to open up opportunities for his business and thus extends the market is living Aristotle’s definition: Time is the number of motion.

  He is aware of the price of time; the duration of his journey can be clearly expressed in terms of money.

  For the merchant, professional time becomes the time he lives in, a dimension fundamentally detached from petrified, supernatural, ecclesiastical time, whose demands he will ever more be obliged to ignore. But the merchant will donate part of his profit to the Church and work on his own personal salvation. Le Goff says, “It is important to eliminate the suspicion that the psychology of the medieval merchant was hypocritical.” He sincerely hoped for salvation, but he prayed with equal sincerity for the success of his transactions, in which he resold God’s time.

  Before long, the citizens of Aire would be calling the time given by the working bell reliable hours, as opposed to the unreliable hours of the church belfries. The decisive move towards the domination of working time came with mechanical clocks, Le Goff writes. The foundations of that innovation were laid in the thirteenth century, and by the second quarter of the fourteenth century urban clocks had been installed across northern Italy, Catalonia, Flanders, Germany, northern France and southern England. The sixty-minute hour was introduced, which constituted one twenty-fourth of the day. Instead of the working day, which went from dawn till dusk, the so-called nono, the ninth hour, was introduced and the hour became the basic unit of work. The ninth hour was intended for rest. It began around what today is two in the afternoon and finished at three, only to be brought forward to today’s noon. Did you know that that is the origin of the word noon? Despite these developments, time had not yet been standardized. In Journey to Italy, Michel de Montaigne describes the chaos a traveller finds himself in because time changes from one city to another: The zero hour is sometimes midnight, sometimes noon, and it could also be sunrise or sunset, Le Goff explains. The crucial shift towards subjectivising time would only come with the invention of the wristwatch, which measures our personal time. It also marked the end of God’s time.

  18

  In another letter, Le Goff’s book fuelled her obsession with debt and guilt. She wrote to me:

  Dear David,

  If we’ve learned anything from Nietzsche, it’s that the relationship of the debtor and the creditor is the foundation of society. It’s like this: the morals of a community are a catalogue of what we owe others; tradition – of what we owe our ancestors; the family we were born into – what we owe our parents; the Church as steward – what we owe God; patriotism – what we owe the State and nation; the economy – what we owe the usurers; ecology – what we owe Mother Nature; life itself – what we owe God, Nature, providence and chance... or in my case my dear mother, who never fails to remind me of that.

  And politics is a guardian of the system where everything can be changed except the fundamental debtor-creditor relationship, i.e. nothing. What then is the meaning of life other than damn repayment of debt? I mean, other than the production of even more debt to saddle our children with? Which you and I won’t have, fortunately, because we’re not villains like that.

  I think I’ve already mentioned Benjamin’s essay to you, the one where he claims capitalism is a pure religious cult – one of the most extreme in human history. A cult is something that turns our lives into an unrestricted celebration of the outwardly secular, but which is actually occult; a permanent liturgy, restless and merciless. It is a cult that, instead of repentance and absolution, offers an endless feeling of guilt that becomes stronger with every heartbeat, an endless accumulation of debt; both ethically and literally, expressed in money. I read in the paper this morning that every French baby comes into the world with 22,000 euros of debt. People are thus born in chains, while all around us, as far as the eye can see, flags of freedom proudly fly. Before the baby grows up and can begin working and repaying the debt, it needs an education. Which is not possible, of course, without incurring additional debt. The Federal Reserve estimates that the total sum of student loans in the USA amounts to one thousand billion dollars.

  I know all this, and still I can’t do it... I can’t because I feel a debt to my mother, who had me so I would be her toy, and then kept me to be her slave. I can’t, because that debt makes me feel guilty. Benjamin points out that the German word Schuld means both guilt and debt.

  There is no mouse-hole for me to hide in, not when I’m surrounded by all those stewards of debt acting as agents of the creditor. The Church is the most flagrant example. Jesus died for us on the cross to free us, after which we are indebted exclusively to the Church. It warns us that writing off the debt will not come cheaply – we are indebted to those who represent Him who relieved us of our debts. That is what has now become of La Nona Ora, the ninth hour...

  At the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice: ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani?’ Father, Father why have you forsaken me? I yell and shout: Mother, Mother why will you not forsake me?

  How was that woman able to implant the idea in me that I have no right to kill myself while she is alive? To begin with, she considered the pregnancy from which she bore me to be a greater sacrifice than Jesus’ death. Jesus ultimately died at the ninth hour, while she had to carry me for a whole nine months. She preached at me about the pain of parents who lose a child. There was nothing more terrible, she said, and surely I wouldn’t do that to my poor mother. She hammered that into my head, so now I hang from the gallows of life, bleeding and in pain, but there will be no relief for me until she dies, which she refuses to do. The tanker loads of alcohol she’s drunk would have killed an elephant, but she continues to drink and to rule this house with confidence, along with my life. She is the owner of my debt.

  It’s like that everywhere, the whole world over. The Academy of Arts and Sciences and other institutions of national culture present themselves as stewards of tradition. The army traditionally figures as a steward of the debt to the nation-state, while in peacetime the class of political representatives assumes that job. Not to mention the Super-ego, which is the most brutal debt collector. However much guilt people feel, and however much regret they pay off the interest with, the principal remains untouched (moreover, the more we regret, the greater the guilt), but the actual amount we owe is unknown, though obviously immeasurable. The issue of debt is evidently a keystone of society, but also of our personality.

  The representatives of debt like to stress that we are free. My mother, too, says I should do as I like and tells me it’s my life and mine alone. But before I take the final step, I should at least spare a thought for my mother and what it would mean for her... That’s how it is. Not only did Jesus free us, but freedoms are also guaranteed to us by the Constitution and the laws of the land, as well as the Charter of Human Rights, libertarian traditions, and ultimately the army, as our freedom’s last line of defence. We are free, ultimately, to choose our usurer: The choice of bank where we will raise a loan is a luxury and ours alone.

  Whenever I look at my watch, it’s three o’clock – always the ninth hour. I wake up at night, drag myself to the kitchen because I’m burning with thirst, and the clock on the wall shows three in the afternoon. Has it stopped? I check, and I see that it’s working. Then at dawn, when the mist has fled before the light and those stupid roosters are crowing their heads off, the clock in my mobile shows three in the afternoon. I check all the clocks in the house; they all say it’s three. I tell Tereza, the cook, a woman of the people and an expert on the irrational. She crosses herself and offers me her rosary. “You need protection, don’t refuse The Saviour,” she says to me. “I’ll pray for you when I’m next at the monastery.” She’s five months pregnant, but that doesn’t stop her from going by bus on a pilgrimage to Ostrog Monastery every t
hird week. What does she pray for there? For the return of her child’s father, who bolted when he heard she was pregnant.

  19

  There were times she would ring at three in the morning, sometimes drunk, sometimes stoned. We’d talk until dawn, or until she fell asleep with the phone in her hand. Then I lay in bed and listened to her breathing. That was all I had of her. It was enough.

  20

  My days in Podgorica continued like that until Todorović knocked on my door one morning and announced jubilantly: “We’re onto something!”

  Olga Hafner, actually Olga Pavlović, my grandmother who wasn’t my grandmother, had signed a deed of adoption and taken me from an orphanage in September 1983. The manager of the orphanage was still alive. Todorović had found her in Dobrota, near Kotor, where she had retired to a house inherited from her late husband. At first she refused to talk on the topic: “It was so long ago. No one can remember things like that.” But Todorović was persistent, and in the end she told him that a secret-service agent had brought the boy to the orphanage. “We’ll send someone for him,” the gloomy man said before he left. Less than a month later, he visited again and gave her instructions: “The woman will introduce herself as Olga Hafner. This is her photograph. You’ll give her the child, and you won’t ask any superfluous questions. Is that clear?”

  She saw the agent once more – after the woman had taken the baby. He suddenly turned up in her office and sat down at the desk. He demanded all the documents that proved the child had been at the orphanage and then proceeded to burn them one by one. “None of these ever existed,” he explained to her. “None of this ever happened, especially not the child. Is that clear?”

  She was a woman for whom orders were orders, particularly when they came from the State. She would have taken the secret with her to the grave if Todorović had not turned up and invoked the ‘interests of the State’. The system has come to claim its own, so I will give it its due, she thought.

  But the old woman didn’t remember my mother’s name. She couldn’t have, because she had never known it. Neither the mother nor the child had a name, and none of their particulars had ever been revealed to her. She looked after the child in secrecy and passed it on to Olga Hafner under a cloak of silence. Everything to do with the child was a secret – one she never stopped thinking about and still remembered every detail of today, in advanced old age, when even the faces of her late husband and daughter were fading.

  That’s good for starters, I thought when I saw out Todorović, who had given me three kisses when he arrived, according to Orthodox custom, and gave me three more when he left, glowing with happiness at the idea that Mandušić might promote him for accomplishing the task so well. I’m becoming a serious secret, I thought – something it’s not beneath my dignity to deal with.

  I could forget about grandmother and everything she had told me about myself. Now I had to focus on my mother – the key to the story. Who was ‘Ida Hafner’ and what was her real name? What did that woman do to earn the dubious privilege of having the Yugoslav secret service take care of her child?

  So many questions and not a single answer... I’d think about it all tomorrow, I decided. I phoned Goran. As I expected, he accepted my invitation for a party at my place in Podgorica that night. He promised to bring Maria. I had reason to celebrate. Todorović’s discovery amounted to an ontological promotion. I wasn’t actually a lazy, nihilistic alcoholic from a provincial backwater. Whatever I finally discovered myself to be would be more exciting than what I thought I knew about myself. The feeling that had accompanied me from the very beginning of my existence – a sense of absolute, cosmic coldness and solitude – now seemed much more complex than a whim or a character flaw; it seemed understandable, justified and ultimately correct. Not only did I perceive all my fellow citizens as foreign, but I was a foreigner to myself. That’s how it was and that’s how it always would be, because that’s how it was meant to be.

  I opened a present from Mandušić – a bottle of eighteen-year-old Jura, poured myself three fingers of whisky (the closest I ever got to Orthodoxy and their three-finger salute) in a crystal glass of my grandmother’s; stretched out on the couch and put on a Mono album at full blare: For my Parents.

  21

  The party was to my liking, lots of alcohol and not many people. I had a load of Mandušić’s whisky all to myself because Maria and Goran were getting into a batch of rare Primitivo Barrique – no more and no less than ten bottles – that they had taken from Elletra’s splendid wine cellar. Everything was great until Radovan turned up with two business partners and a prostitute in tow.

  You could see straight way that he had succeeded in life. The lady of his heart had rags worth a good two thousand euros on her and at least twice that much in her, in implants. I congratulated Radovan on moving on from The Second Chance and those asylum seekers from undemocratic Eastern Bloc states, and I really meant it – I am someone who takes delight in others’ good fortune. But that wasn’t to the liking of his escort. She claimed she wasn’t a prostitute; in any case she didn’t feel like one. Seething with rage, she stepped up to me and hit me with her CV. She had earned a law degree and gained a PhD in public relations; now she ran an NGO that ‘worked to strengthen democratic institutions and control the work of the Montenegrin government in co-ordination with a number of foreign embassies in Podgorica’ – those were her exact words; and she performed legal services for Radovan in connection with a site he had bought in Bar, where he planned to develop a five-star, luxury boutique hotel. She had come along because Radovan insisted and assured her I wasn’t a bad guy, although she harboured the deepest contempt for me as well as all intellectuals who betrayed every principle they had ever stood for.

  Radovan grabbed her by the hand and pulled her away to the other room, where, to my horror, he poured her a full glass of Mandušić’s whisky. Then he came back to me and said with a wink: “How about she blows you one afterwards? I’ll pay.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “That bit about co-operating with foreign embassies hit me like a ton of bricks. I hate to think what that means and what repercussions it could have for the people of this country, and thus for me. Call it paranoia if you like, but after that I need a good stiff drink,” I remarked and walked away. I hoped I’d seen the last of him.

  Throughout the evening, Radovan and his business partners took it in turns to perform legal consultations with the NGO activist in my toilet and showed absolutely no interest in mixing with me, Goran and Maria. The three of us went out onto the balcony and sat there, drinking. Maria and I were slagging off Radovan, who, ever since we’d known him, had succeeded in turning other people’s money into his own and setting up a big construction firm that sold hundreds of flats along the coast. Like me, Maria had detested him from the very beginning but put up with him because he found it ‘awesome’ to socialise with us and was willing to be our free taxi service and drive us home when we were drunk, high or sick. Now Maria, like me, didn’t have the nerves to cope with this animal any more. Goran, as usual, had to say a few words in his defence. That struck me as suspect.

  “Hold on, you haven’t become a ‘business partner’ of Radovan’s too, have you?”

  He went red. The topic was clearly unpleasant for him. He decided to play the, I’m offended that you even thought of it card. I didn’t want to torment my friend, so I accepted his bluff:

  “Forget it, I was just joking. They’re all welcome. Cheers, and may our livers always be young...”

  The peaceful coexistence between Radovan’s crew and us lasted until Maria wanted to dance and put on ‘Enola Gay’ by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

  “Why the hell did ya put on those poofs?” the drunken Radovan yelled the moment he heard the word gay.

  I opened the door and pointed to the corridor.

  “Out!” I hissed. “Or would you prefer leaving through the window?”


  Those swine who had rooted their way to success in the new capitalist system figured I meant business. They were right, animals like that have a good sense of danger. They grabbed their things and made a move, leaving a few used condoms behind on my bathroom floor.

  “You’re making a mistake, mate,” Radovan whispered on the way out. “Things have changed – you’re not in a position to mess around Radovan any more.”

  I slammed the door behind them.

  “Good, let’s start again,” I called, as if they had never been there. “Put the song on again.”

  That was just what Maria had been waiting for. I dropped into the armchair and watched as she danced with her eyes closed, so beautifully, with such dedication, as if that was her last will and testament, as if she had chosen it to be her life’s final deed.

  Later, when Maria had fallen asleep on the couch and Goran and I were pouring our third one more and then it’s off to bed out on the balcony, I explained what had so infuriated me about Radovan’s idiotic comment.

  “What you don’t know is that that song is my and Maria’s little secret,” I told him. “Once we were sitting on the terrace of my house in Ulcinj before dawn, after a drinking spree that makes this look tame, watching the calm sea and the currents coming up from Otranto, and she proposed a scenario for the end of the world. Imagine - shit happens and everything is obliterated in the flood. Only she and I survive. Nothing terrible, you might say; we are the new Adam and Eve, and everything can begin anew. But then we give the ‘up yours’ salute to God, history and the human race. We live happily and not particularly long. But we never shag and make babies, so everything ends with us. The two of us reign over a world, finally globalized, where only two human beings still exist and there is only one state – ours. And its anthem is ‘Enola Gay’.”