Till Kingdom Come

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  “Have you seen that Japan was hit by another earthquake last night?” she asked. Just a few hours after the ground had settled the social networks, already idiot-friendly, were hit by a tsunami of brain-dead comments, which boiled down to: ‘Look, Mother Nature has sent us another warning. What will be in store for us if we keep refusing to respect her and go on opposing her laws?’

  “But Mother Nature is no less a tyrant than God the Father. And not only that: Mother Nature doesn’t give a damn about us. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists who believe that our cities will be subject to fire-and-brimstone because we tolerate homosexuals and their ‘unnatural’ practices, and Mother’s fundamentalists, who believe we will be blotted out because we tolerate the disruption of the natural balance, are on the same ontological wavelength. Their vengeful mother who destroys us is just a Dionysian version of their Apollonian, wrathful Old-Testament patriarch,” she sneered.

  “To say that we ourselves are to blame for tragedies, whose dimensions are beyond our comprehension, because we offended Him or Her, the “One” who determines our destinies, is the most facile and therefore most commonly encountered answer. Any old balderdash that attributes “meaning” is obviously still more desirable than the absence of meaning. Meaning is highly overrated, to be sure. Never before has a higher price been paid for something that doesn’t exist.”

  “What is in balance in the natural world? What harmony can those nutters see in the tyranny of Mother Nature? Wherever you look in this garden, some wild animal is preying on a thing smaller and weaker than itself. Everywhere creatures are dying in terror and agony, meeting a slow, painful death in the jaws of another that, naturally, sucks its blood and savours the head it crunches between its teeth. The harmony is just in our imagination when we watch that beauty from a safe distance. We only see the green and the waving treetops and are oblivious to the death and horror that actually reign there. So-called harmony is only visible to us standing outside, exempt from its laws. What we see is a garden to us, but for everything inside it is a battlefield, a slaughterhouse, where the universal code is to kill and be killed.”

  “And then there are all those botched-up creatures, whose design shows not only the absence of order, but also of reason. Take the hedgehog, for example. Its spines protect it against others, but the very same prickles cause it great pain. The hedgehog’s strong point is also its tragic flaw. Did you know that the female hedgehog keeps putting off the birth of her babies in fear of the pain that their spines could cause when they leave the womb?” she asked.

  42

  The opportunity I had been waiting for to confide in Maria about all the disquieting and improbable but very real discoveries I had made about my mother came after dinner.

  We withdrew into the drawing room. I sat on the divan, and she lay down, with her head on my lap and her right arm reaching down my legs.

  “Don’t I just look like the woman on Lucian Freud’s painting Standing by the Rags... Don’t I just!” she repeated. The thought obviously amused her. Then, with the greatest attentiveness, she listened to what I had to tell her...

  “That’s the way it all is, I believe,” I said at the end of my confession. She stroked my face, pulled my head down to hers and kissed me on the forehead.

  “What a shame that’s not all true,” she said. “Because if it was – if you were her son – you would have saved me from misery. That would have been easy for you. You would have saved me, and I would finally have been able to love you; because I can only love that which can destroy me.”

  “That’s why the bond between me and Elletra is so strong,” she continued, “and that’s why she can run this house and my life from her tower without giving a single order. Of all the things she’s done and said that made me suffer, do you know what hurt the most? It was long ago, back when she still used to leave the house and I had just made it through my teenage years. One morning we went for a walk through the pine forest. It was early summer, when you can still get through town and feel relaxed. Among the few bathers we saw on the beaches were a young man and woman. He was reading a book, and she lay with her head on his lap, softly humming. And Elletra said, ‘If only I could feel the light-heartedness of the beginning again for just one second, if only I could turn back the clock to when my illusions and hopes were stronger than all the signs of inevitable doom’.”

  “That morning, I had the terrible realization that nothing of mine, not even my sorrow, is unique. We convince ourselves that our sorrow is exalted, that our pain makes us exceptional, and that when it hurts we are close to something authentic and significant. But sorrow is like the large intestine; everyone has one. Even in pain you’re not alone or special. Realizing that my mother had already been in the space I considered my very own sanctuary, that she thought and suffered the same way as me, yet became the picture of misery she was that morning and still is today, and that I’m no different to her – that was a blow I have never recovered from,” Maria said.

  Then she went and sat at the piano. I don’t know what it was she played, but it was slow and repetitive. I stared at her long, white fingers caressing the keys made from parts of a dead elephant and soon fell asleep, imagining my mother, with her eyes closed and a look of enjoyment on her face, kneeling over a victim and gently running her finger over his dead, clenched teeth.

  43

  The boat seesawed on the water like a cradle while outside loud music and the hubbub of the crowd jostling at Camden Market could be heard. Drunken boys sang fans’ songs, and a cheerful Pakistani called out the specialties at his stall.

  I stepped over the police ‘do-not-cross’ tape around the scene of the crime. Below deck there was a large red stain on a white rug and two chalk outlines next to it where the bodies were found. I could see a hole made by a knife in the wooden wall of the cabin. I was interested in the shelf with the DVDs and looked for a silver case with ‘X’ written on it in blue felt-tip, a Verbatim disc. It wasn’t there. As I was heading to the kitchenette, I passed a cracked mirror in the corridor. Despite the dark, I saw a woman in the mirror: a pale face framed by golden hair, beautiful and terrible at the same time because the eyes were missing in her otherwise perfect, well-proportioned features.

  When I opened my eyes, water was dripping from the ceiling. An unbearable clamour came from upstairs. It was Tereza’s voice, and through her crying I could hear her shout: Call the police! Call the police! I propped myself up on the ottoman and realized it was like a boat in water: Maria’s drawing room was flooded. I got up and made for the stairs but stopped beside the big window that looked out into the garden. Water from the house was gushing out through it, turning the manicured lawn into a mire. Day was breaking. The first rays of sunlight were piercing the treetops. Tereza screamed again and I started running up the stairs.

  Water was pouring in a torrent down the broad, winding stairs. The bathroom door stood wide open and I could see Tereza kneeling beside the huge old cast-iron bath, holding Maria’s lifeless body. As I rushed in to help, I trod on something and slipped. I reached into the water with my left hand. It came out holding an empty jar of Zolpidem sleeping tablets. Only then did I notice that my Patek Philippe watch, Maria’s present for my eighteenth birthday, was broken and had stopped at the number three. When I saw Maria’s naked body, as white as a sheet, I closed my eyes in shame and took a few steps back; now I could only see Tereza’s back, with Maria’s arms dangling down it and her fingertips playing in the water.

  “Call a doctor, call the police, for God’s sake call someone!” Tereza sobbed.

  44

  Inspector Kruti held a short, routine conversation with me.

  “Were you close to the deceased?”

  “You know I was.”

  “I know, but please bear with me. It’s the procedure. You’re the last person to have seen her alive.”

  “Possibly, but I fell asleep early and now I
blame myself. If I’d stayed awake I would have been able to stop her.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I’m thinking of her condition, of course. She went to see Dr Milić for years. He prescribed her antidepressants, but she didn’t take them.”

  “I would have thought that a doctor’s medical ethics would prevent him from giving you her record card.”

  ‘Spare me that, please... So the last time you saw her alive was when she was playing the piano?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s all for now. Are you planning to leave Ulcinj?”

  “Yes, actually. I’m flying to Germany this afternoon. Is that a problem?”

  “Why should it be? I’ll leave you now to your pain. I have a long day ahead of me: I have to question all the servants and try to somehow contact Madam Elletra...”

  “You’re not staying for the funeral?” Tereza asked when she saw me on the stairs with my bag in hand. She didn’t wait for an answer; she prodded the carpet in the corridor to check it was dry and went over the bathroom floor again with another cloth. Then she sat on the edge of the bath, stretched out her tired, swollen legs and stared at her belly. She gave a heavy sigh but was satisfied, like someone who has just cleansed the world of all its filth.

  45

  At least I think that’s how it was.

  Two days later, when I was sitting on the terrace of Hotel Catalonia Colombo in Manacor, I received an email from Inspector Kruti. He complained that I hadn’t been answering his calls. The autopsy confirmed that Maria had died of an overdose of sleeping tablets. Her death was still considered a suicide, but he’d still like to have a word with me about one detail and kindly asked me to come to the Ulcinj police station to answer a few questions as soon as possible; he didn’t like to think he might have to subpoena me. The tablets Maria took, Zolpidem, were not sold in Montenegro; he had checked my bank account and established that I had recently bought a pack of those same tablets with my Visa card at a pharmacy in Oxford Street. He was sure we would soon be able to clear up this strange coincidence.

  What should I tell the good inspector? That the big picture we try to piece together is never complete? That there always remains some detail that doesn’t fit into the mosaic, some trifling little thing that overturns the system we thought we had seen, something that deletes all the answers we’ve arrived at and opens up a host of new questions?

  Should I tell him about my investigation and the blank at the heart of it, marked with a question mark? Should I let him know that that there is no grave of an Ida Hafner at the cemetery in Kronberg near Frankfurt? Should I share with him what Wovenhand had written the day before, which led me to Mallorca? Should I tell him that I already know this won’t be the end, and that after my visit to the cemetery here everything will just keep on going, till kingdom come?

  With these thoughts in my mind, I came across a curious news item in the copy of The New York Times that the friendly waiter brought me with my coffee:

  Associated Press, London – The future will stop completely, claim Spanish scientists, who have devised a theory to explain why the universe appears to be expanding and accelerating continuously. Ultimately, they say, time will stop completely.

  Observations of supernovae, or exploding stars, found the movement of light indicated they were moving faster than those nearer to the centre of the universe. But the scientists claimed the accepted theory of an opposite force to gravity, known as dark energy, was wrong, and said the reality was that the growth of the universe was slowing.

  Professors Jose Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raul Vera said the deceleration of time was so gradual it was imperceptible to humans. They claimed dark energy does not exist and that time was winding down to the point when it would finally grind to a halt long after the planet ceased to exist.

  The slowing down of time will eventually mean everything will appear to take place faster and faster until it eventually disappears.

  There was a final sentence, too, where the language of science, having reached an impasse, returned to the language of poetry. I lingered over it for a long time. Professor Senovilla made the statement in the New Scientist magazine, describing what would happen when time finally stood still, and I recited this sentence to myself like a prayer for the comforting outcome I want to believe in:

  “Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever.”

  THE AUTHOR

  Andrej Nikolaidis was born in 1974 to a mixed Montenegrin-Greek family and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia. In 1992, following the breakout of ethnic strife in the country that soon erupted into an all-out war, Nikolaidis’ family moved to Ulcinj, his father’s hometown in Montenegro, where he still lives. An ardent supporter of Montenegrin independence, anti-war activist and promoter of human rights, especially minority rights, Nikolaidis initially became known for his political views and public feuds, appearing on local television and in newspapers with his razor-sharp political commentaries. He now works as a free-lance journalist and has recently written a number of articles for The Guardian. He has two other novels published with Istros Books: The Coming (2012) and The Son (2013), and in total his work has been translated into 12 European languages.

  THE TRANSLATOR

  Will Firth was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb and Moscow. Since 1991 he has been living in Berlin, Germany, where he works as a freelance translator of literature and the humanities. He translates from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croat. His website is www.willfirth.de.

  In 2015, Firth was shortlisted for the prestigious Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for his translation from the Serbian of The Great War by Aleksandar Gatalica.