Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  You will ask me what Malik was doing in the meantime. No matter what I told you, I would be lying. Sometimes he was not around for days and then when he appeared, with green circles under his eyes, he would start talking to me about the prices of human organs. ‘You get tree hundred tousand for head wit eyes. Dude, if you will have tree hundred brats, you know how much cash dat will be?’ I looked away. Of course, I realized that Malik had got me mixed up in a business that not only was not fine fine, it was totally fucked up. Although – and this is what I kept telling myself, probably to cleanse my conscience, despite the fact that I was cleansing my conscience primarily by making sentences; the sentences were supposed to change me into somebody more virtuous – I had not done anything so far. I had been listening to the merely invented stories of a crazy woman and shreds and patches from the mouth of an African drifter. ‘Da Lebanese, dey are notting but a way station, and dat is all. Everyting start wit Julie Amado and end in Saudi Arabia, where you can buy da child heart at da market like you buy da fish. Before before, dey bring da kids from Sudan, but because of da war and dat ting in Chad (you remember, da plane wit tree hundred kids?), da traffic it dry up. People like dat colonel I have talk you about, dey have use deir position to contact da French humanitarian worker. Before before, dey have slice up da kids any way dey feel like, but now dey want dat da brats will get to Arabia alive. Den dey will decide dere what organs dey will take. Da more fresh dey are, da less damaged dey are, da more plenty is da cash for da suppliers at da start.’

  ‘Where do all da money go den? To feed da cats?’ I asked Malik when we were sitting on the beach watching the sea. ‘Can you no get me out of dis? Can you no lend me da cash so I go back to Ouaga? I will sit on da first bus out of here and no open my mout at all.’

  ‘Did Julie no talk you dat when you have get in dis business dere is den no way out?’ Now instead of me it was Malik who was laughing; he pointed a finger at some undefined point. ‘Unless you go sit down on da plastic raft, catch da big big fish, maybe even da shark, what do I care, tie it to da raft and, vroom, vroom, away you go. In tree days you are wit Ana – dat is what you call her, no?’

  I looked at Malik’s back to see if maybe ganja really was growing out of his arse. He was completely stoned. ‘If it is like dat, den I prefer to go wit da balloon.’ I took off my T-shirt and went into the sea. The infinite, colourless sea, which infinitely attracted me. In this situation – I mean, so I would not swim off and drown or go back to the house and massacre all of Julie’s cats – the only thing saving me was that I could type on the typewriter and coax that horrible sound from it. I decided I would not just write letters to Ana, I would dedicate an entire novel to her.

  * * *

  At a nearby news stand, I bought a pack of cigarettes and a card for making calls to foreign countries and, thus equipped, climbed onto the roof of the family house. I know now: it was from here that Ismael gazed at the fire the farmers spread during the harmattan season; from here he watched the fleeing animals, the burning birds that fly like phoenixes until they are swallowed by flames. This was the place he rested and dreamed, although the main feeling I had up here was that I had come to say goodbye. I had wanted to move past the imagined caresses of that young male body, but I had failed. I had wanted to get beyond the bitter sorrow, the mounting loneliness, but clearly I didn’t make the right investment. So it was time to leave. Besides, there was no point in being a burden to Ismael’s aunt. When people came into the yard she would make up stories on my behalf, stories hardly anybody believed; once an old woman even grabbed at my belly and started shouting rude words in my face, the rudest words I had ever heard in my life. The aunt tried to soothe me, told me not to pay her any attention, that she was just talking nonsense, but all the same I knew: it was wrong for me to use Ismael to get beyond what I was feeling; Ismael was meant for other things.

  I keyed the number of the calling card into the mobile phone and then my father’s telephone number. Before I made any decision, before I climbed down from the roof and left the burning birds to hover in the air, I had to see how things stood with my father. Had he disowned me after I admitted that I had got close to somebody here, somebody a few decades younger than me? Had he disowned me because, despite his complaints about the impaired half of his brain, I had still not decided to return? Or was everything the same as before? If everything was the same as before, that was actually a good thing for me; if he was pleasant, that meant they had replaced his heart. And in that case, I wouldn’t have anywhere to go back to.

  ‘Ana, Ana! Ismael is calling! Ana...’ I thought I was asleep and dreaming at the same time. I hadn’t even lit a cigarette, hadn’t thought things through yet, when they were calling to me from below.

  ‘Keep him on the phone,’ I shouted, when I realized who was on the line. ‘Keep him...’ Just then the mobile slipped out of my hands; it rolled a while down the tin roof, until you couldn’t hear anymore which direction it was falling, probably into emptiness, onto the ground, the soft loamy ground, which cushioned all blows – then, all the same, I got up as fast as I could and felt for the ladder with my foot, with the tips of my toes in fact; it seemed like a millennium before I found the ground beneath my feet. But when I did, I realized: this was that feeling. Hadn’t I turned to Ismael because I wanted to rid myself of the idea that you are born for life but instead you are thrust into death? Had I read that somewhere? Though I hadn’t read anything for a long time. Except the lines on Ismael’s and my palms.

  They were tingling when I picked up the telephone receiver in Baba’s room. Between pushing back the curtain and actually stepping into the dark space, which was marked only by pictures and a large clock, I saw that Baba, too, was preserving the memory of an image of himself as he once was. For a few moments I said nothing; then I said only that blithe ‘hello’.

  ‘Ana, Ana, if you only knew...’

  Suddenly the phone went dead. I glanced toward the entrance, as if I was expecting somebody, as if I could already see his silhouette arriving, but I came at once to my senses and slunk into a corner of the room. My heart was pounding, the way my father’s may have pounded at the thought that he needed an operation. I had been trying to remember his face. Two arcs running from his nose to his mouth and in the middle the aquiline passage for breathing. The way he stood beneath the chandelier when I brought my Paris lover home, although at the time he was not yet my Paris lover, and the way he stood in the shop in front of a piece of meat. As though it had nothing to do with him. As if that ‘black fellow’ would be leaving any minute now and any minute now the meat would be wrapped in translucent paper and it would be as though nothing had ever happened. When as a child, a tiny, pointless little girl, I would go with him to the butcher’s, I was always obsessed by the idea that it could be us lying there in the display case – me, Mama and father. We’d lie there and the dismembered pieces would buy us. Probably this was also because as a child, more than now, I was aware that we were corpses that still had life in them. Later, in my English period I suppose, I discovered that Francis Bacon’s way of thinking was similar to what mine had been in the most metaphysical years of my life – he connected slaughterhouses with the crucified Jesus and animal fear, which might of course sound blasphemous. But Bacon was an unbeliever, so the notion of blasphemy had no place in the concept of his art.

  The telephone rang again. I heard the ringing in my head, in my body, maybe even more intensely because everyone outside in the yard was holding their breath. The night, the goats, even the farmers setting fire to the grass, for a moment were all still. As I picked up the receiver, and even after I said, not that vapid ‘hello’, but Ismael’s name, I was aware that our love would last the length of one dry season. We had sown seeds in the earth and because nothing had sprouted, because nothing ever could sprout, it seemed that it was all mere accident, that I myself was a being robbed of meaning. Bacon would have probably said that from this
perspective Jesus too was just such an accidental being, who played to the end a game without cause or purpose. I tucked my hair behind my ears. But what would my father have said?

  ‘Ana, don’t you recognize me? Has it come to this now?’ It was the deep, melancholy voice of an old man who had just had his heart operated on. He, perhaps, still believed that the cross was not a game without cause or purpose; he, at least, still allowed for the religious possibility, despite that distant, forgotten membership in the former party, which had been of no use to him except as a cover. Primarily, so he could practice his semi-bourgeois law profession in peace; I am talking, of course, about the period of salvationist Yugoslav Communism. I suspected, in other words, that he knew, not because he told me but because you could see it in his face. Most intensely, between those two melancholy lines that, like two fields glimpsed from above, ran down to his mouth.

  ‘I thought it was Ismael.’ I repeated his name intentionally, the name of the lover who left me, whom I last saw under a Coca-Cola umbrella, his face slightly shadowed from the side, his penis slightly tense; everything could have been different, but, because everything was as it was now, there was a palpable note of anger in my voice. Besides, with the telephone line occupied, my faraway lover would not be able to call back even if he wanted to. All we had been able to find out was that he went to Benin. Where exactly, with what aim, remained a mystery. We suspected, although nobody had the courage to tell us, that he had gone with that white larva, who would not let him breathe, who would not let him out of his claws.

  ‘I tried calling you a few times already, but then I remembered I had to dial 00226 first.’

  I breathed into the receiver. He had intentionally ignored my rude response, so things were still the same as before, his heart was still in the same place and I could easily return. Or should I stay a bit longer and then return? ‘Are you okay?’ I asked all the same, after that sigh. But then I didn’t wait for an answer. I stretched my legs out in the corner of the room, glanced a moment at Baba’s photos hanging on the wall, although that story, the story of Baba in his youth, wasn’t important now, rested the receiver on my thigh, and thought about Ismael’s clean, dark face. A face which revealed ‘that treasure’, ‘that lump of gold’, ‘that hidden diamond’. A face, as Bacon or if not him then somebody else might say, on which I directed my gaze in order to find out why I still persevered in an ‘accident’ robbed of all meaning. I suddenly grabbed the receiver and, as in a dream, over the sound of my father’s complaints, said, ‘I know now why you always had to leave the butcher’s shop. It wasn’t because you felt sick, like you said, but simply because you couldn’t bear death. That’s what it was, wasn’t it?’

  A moment of silence. Like animals before they sense mortal danger, like birds before the fire grazes their feathers. In that hundredth of a second I understood that Ismael and I would have got along as children. He would have shown me how you start a fire in the desert, how you kill a cobra – no, no, he wouldn’t, since he had never done that; Ismael was afraid of snakes; I must have read that somewhere, I mean about Africa and snakes, but even so – and I would have shown him the place where pigs were slaughtered. We would have sneaked into a slaughterhouse run by strangers, people who had nothing in common with my parents. The fact that I was entrusted to the dazzling afternoons, without even the housekeeper’s supervision, held a certain charm: all at once I discovered independence. A screen grew up between me and questions about life and death. But who knows – was it because of all of this that, even now, I don’t have pig’s blood running out of my head?

  ‘Ana, I’m going to hire the best lawyer in town to get you out of there...’

  I laughed and hung up the phone. If it hadn’t been night outside, if I didn’t have to push past the aunt, who, even after I came outside, was still craning her head toward the entrance, pretending she had been listening to something else and not my brief dialogue with Ismael or my cowardly dialogue with my father, if I hadn’t wanted to smoke a cigarette on the roof, I would have told my father that my need for the kind of consolation I discovered in Africa was no small thing. But because I needed to say goodbye to the place where Ismael rested, where he dreamed, a place pierced through with the smell of scorched grass, with scorched birds in the air, I poked around and found my mobile phone – somewhere between the goat pen and the clay water pot from which children, especially, scooped cold water during the day – and climbed back up the ladder to the roof.

  * * *

  When did I stop believing even in art? When my son had his breakdown? Or when I went to the desert? It happened more than twenty years ago, in the eighties, in Paris. We were sitting in a brightly lit restaurant – me, my Paris lover, his absent children, his two wives, one dead and the other still with life in her as she waited in the blue house by the sea, and maybe a few others too, people I didn’t know about. My lover was in an especially good mood, was chuckling, dressed in a pale-orange tunic and boots with raised heels, and when he was walking toward me – we met outside, on the street; I had come from the hotel room, where I had spent the day; right before leaving I merely put on some perfume and brushed my hair; he had probably just shut off the computer or maybe had stopped at a nearby bar on the way, I don’t know – I noticed a walking stick in his right hand, which I didn’t remember him taking in the morning. Looking like this, from a distance, he even seemed too clownish – there was always something of that in his films too, with their colours, kitsch, sense of the dramatic, not to mention his paintings – but when he embraced me and said we had to celebrate the success of his latest film, I knew there was a time for joy and a time for sorrow.

  ‘How did you spend your day?’ I asked, and returned his embrace, rubbing the back of my hand against the folds of the rustling material he was wearing over his trousers and sweater.

  It was as if he hadn’t heard me. He shifted the walking stick to his left hand and started saying something about how he had gone from theatre into film-making, how he had managed to leave theatrical effects behind him, how he was, certainly, grateful to Djibril for everything he had learned from him, but he would probably surpass him soon. For a moment I didn’t know who he was talking about – at the time I still hadn’t seen the avant-garde film Touki Bouki; my eyes had not yet encountered all that light which shines out of Djibril’s films. Maybe my father had seen this light but, inexplicably, never mentioned this small detail to me. Indeed, especially after somebody whispered in his ear that I was strolling around Paris in the close embrace of some black fellow, he hardly ever spoke to me. He’s Senegalese, I later chided him; not all black people are alike, they don’t all come from the same tree – but he, too, pretended not to hear me. He only mumbled that something was going on with Mama’s brother. He had started writing for the newspapers, book reviews or art criticism, Father didn’t know exactly.

  As if that brief gesture wasn’t enough for me, I pressed myself ardently and almost painfully against my lover’s body. At the time, he had not yet told me to behave in public as if nothing was going on between us. At the time, he had not yet spoken those words: if you were ten years older, this thing between us could be dangerous for you. All he had said was that after his first wife’s death I was the only woman who had touched him. And when I returned to Ljubljana after my English period, he even pursued me for a time. He had got himself mired in Rome and for nearly a decade was cooking macaroni for some brunette, until he finally decided he needed a house by the sea. In other words, Senegal. That’s when I reappeared, now not in London but Paris, which is why he would say: for me Paris is also Ana in Paris, for me Paris is also Ana on a wide cast-iron bed, her white thighs and the narrowness of her waist – which he took for himself whenever he wanted and as often as he wanted, without, however, telling me that all this time, even as he climbed inside me and moaned his unearthly moan, even as he reached his hand to me across the table in the restaurant, he was thinking about his
dark-skinned children back there.

  I often fantasized how I would sit in the blue house by the sea and, ten years older, as in fact I am, buy fish at the market, shout and run on the beach while he in his tunic tried to catch me, and especially how, in the evening, I would draw a gleaming still life, copying it from the platter onto paper.

  ‘It will never happen,’ I whispered, more to myself than to him – probably to interrupt his self-obsessed monologue, which never touched on us as a couple; this, I thought, was why we were now going to the restaurant, so we could talk about us as a couple, not about his films, in which I never appeared, in which I never would appear – and moved away from him a little. ‘All that we have is this, here. Paris and again Paris – forget about Senegal.’ I don’t know if he understood, or even heard me, since by then we were entering the over-lit room. The people in it seemed to me like something out of a film – exaggerated gestures, contrived faces, overloaded significance – and if my lover had only wanted to, we could have rewound the entire scene. The waiter showed us to our table and offered to help me with my coat; I declined, sat down, slowly, almost lazily undid the buttons, and tossed the coat over the back of the chair. Then, with my knee, I sought out my lover’s knee under the table, in a last hope of getting him on my side, of summoning him into us as a couple. Nothing. Emptiness, Maybe he had heard what I had said after all and this was his way of showing me he was hurt. After the waiter, with a slight bow, left, he started talking in a raffishly taunting way, almost as if I wasn’t there, about Fellini. But first about Djibril, who, he thought, wasn’t able to, didn’t know how to, carry the weight of life – a splendid, lofty man, but too melancholy, takes everything too seriously, whereas today the public demands entertainment – and then he started talking about Fellini. That his last film was, let’s be honest, crap.