Impossible Stories

by Zoran Zivkovic

  As if in answer to this last question, sounds started to come from a great distance. He did not recognize them at first; they were too muffled. At first they resembled the scraping sound of gravel being rolled by waves on the shore and then the drumming of rain on the leaves in a forest on a wet spring evening. Then something in their rhythm seemed not only recognizable but familiar: the monotonous, regular repetition, harmonious only in the introductory chord and then completely dissonant . . .

  There were seven strokes from the moment he started instinctively to count the hour sounding in four disparate registers. How many had he missed until he understood what it was? Three—or maybe more? There was only one way to find out, although he did not understand why it was important to ascertain this fact. He reached for his vest pocket, forgetting completely that he had become incorporeal. But the pocket was there, real and tangible, as were his vest and hand—everything was there except the watch that Mary had given him, that day . . . The watch had gone!

  How was that possible? Why, a little while ago . . . He looked at his vest in panic, only realizing when he saw it that his sight had returned. He was no longer blinded or surrounded by impenetrable emptiness. He stared at his body for a few moments, filled with disbelief, and then slowly raised his eyes and looked around himself.

  He did not notice what was wrong right away. Everything seemed to be normal: things were in their proper places—the workbench which he was still grasping convulsively with one hand, the counter covered with green felt, the old-fashioned clothes tree in the corner with his winter coat hanging from it, two armchairs with reddish upholstery and the round coffee table between them with its thin, curved legs, the large grandfather clock with its pendulum, the mirror on the opposite wall with the black wrought iron frame . . .

  Only after he had taken all of it in did he realize where the problem lay: he should not be able to see it all. The only light in the shop was from the small lamp with the green shade in front of him, and the lamplight barely reached the counter. Now, however, he could see everything as clear as daylight . . .

  Day!

  Daylight flooded through the large shop window with WATCHMAKER written in an arch of dark-blue letters. It was bright and clear, light that in this region was seen only in late spring and during the short summer, certainly not in mid-November. But it was not early winter outside; when a little girl skipped past the shop soon afterward, the watchmaker was perplexed to see that she was wearing a checkered dress with short, ruffled sleeves.

  He got up from his workbench, finally lifting his numb hand from its edge, and took slow, hesitating steps from the counter toward the entrance. When he was in the middle of the shop, out of the corner of his eye he noticed something moving to his right and turned slowly in that direction, encountering his own reflection in the long mirror.

  He squinted and stared at his image, refusing to believe what he saw. It was he, without a doubt, but different, changed—rejuvenated. The person returning his look from the glass was not an old man, stooped, his forehead full of wrinkles, gray-haired and balding. He was a young man, barely thirty, standing straight, with smooth skin and thick, dark hair.

  He started to touch his face gingerly, afraid that even the lightest pressure might deform it into its former deteriorated grimace like a wax mask. His fingers slid over his mouth, chin, cheeks, striving to feel the trickery, but there was no deception: his youthfulness was real—as real as everything else around him seemed to be.

  He continued to look at the long-forgotten person in the mirror, while the confusion in him slowly withdrew before the mounting excitement, when suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, he had a sensation that he had experienced only a few times before, but never as strongly. The feeling of déja vu was all-encompassing, overwhelming: he had stood on this same spot before, looking at himself in the mirror, and the bright summer day had been exactly the same.

  Something caught in his throat when he realized what had to happen next. He had no doubt that it would actually happen as he quickly turned around to face the entrance. The bells above it started to fly loudly in all directions that same instant. Only she entered like that: like a whirlwind of blond curls, with her long, rustling dress, her smile so enchanting in its radiant cheerfulness . . .

  Mary!

  He knew that she would not turn to look at his wide open eyes, would not notice the paralysis that had come over him, that she would not hear the thunderous drumming of his heart that so filled his ears he felt as though the whole shop were echoing. He knew that she would rush to one of the armchairs and unload the armful of colorful boxes she was carrying.

  Her words reverberated in his head a moment before she uttered them, like a reversed echo that precedes the original sound.

  “It’s so terribly hot. It’s even worse downtown. And crowded. You have no idea. It’s as if the whole town were outdoors. You should have come with me. You sit inside too much. It’s not good for you. You could have closed the shop today. There are a lot of people here, too. You should see how many carriages there are in the square. Goodness, I’m all sweaty. And I’m terribly thirsty.”

  She started to rummage impatiently through her rather large handbag made of flowery waterproof fabric; it was always full and now seemed truly inflated. A full minute went by before she finally found what she was looking for. The small box was wrapped in shiny green paper, and the turquoise ribbon had curled ends.

  He did not have to open it to find out what was inside. Nevertheless, he did it as inquisitively as he had earlier because he was impelled by the inexorable pressure of déja vu. Once he had lifted the cover of the pocket watch and looked at the engraved inscription, he smiled broadly and said the sentence he knew went at that place.

  “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

  He did not have the courage to be more eloquent in his thanks this time, even though he wanted to with all his heart. The object he held in his hand meant more to him than a present from his fiancée: it was an infinitely precious keepsake from which he had never parted in the many years which followed. Even so, the fear prevailed that if he used any other words he would cause an irreparable disturbance and would lose this feeling of déja vu that was guiding him.

  Mary returned his smile and then went up to him, raised herself on tiptoes, and kissed him. It was a light, brief touch of the lips, on the very edge of decorum, considering the time and place, but it made him tremble nonetheless. She suddenly turned toward the door, feeling awkward, to see if anyone was about to enter, and then began to pick up the boxes from the armchair. They were full of the beautiful things she had chosen to look stunning at the upcoming ceremony.

  “I’m going to take all of this and get changed. I’m all sweaty and sticky. It’s so hot. You should put on something lighter, too. You’ll boil. Let’s go have lunch at the Golden Jug. What do you say? It’s the coolest there right now, in the garden under the linden trees. All this shopping has made me hungry.”

  She smiled at him again, a special mixture of affection and apology, and then rustled in her whirlwind manner toward the door—to meet the inevitable. The sequence of events stood before him, completely clear, illuminated by the powerful beacon of déja vu: the wild music of the horse bells briefly muffling the thudding that was rapidly approaching; her hurried departure onto the pavement in front of the shop as the empty carriage jumped wildly on the cobblestones; incautiously crossing the street at the very moment the confused horses without a driver, left too long in the sun and frightened by who knew what, could no longer be stopped; the horrible shock at realizing that there was no way of escape; someone’s scream from the other side of the street that seemed to last an eternity; and then the multicolored boxes flying in all directions, opening up and spilling their insides: an elegant lemon-colored dress with an abundance of lace, a yellow hat with a large brim and a wide ribbon tied in a bow, shoes with large, shiny buckles, a pile of silk undergarments that certainly should not have been displayed like t
his—the senseless nakedness of death.

  “Mary!”

  He had to overcome the violent river to utter this word, to scrape off the previous deposit on the palimpsest with his nails, to seize hammer and chisel to write a new inscription on the virgin surface of the granite. The magic of déja vu shattered at that moment—there was no room for this call; his role had been to remain silent, to follow her out merely with his eyes. Stepping out of the play in which he was unwillingly acting, he was suddenly alone, exposed to the winds of time without a guide to light his way, but also without the ominous inexorability of the predetermined.

  She stopped at the door and turned. “Yes, Joseph?”

  He didn’t know what to say. He certainly could not start explaining, particularly since he himself barely understood. So he simply went up to her and hugged her, together with her armful of boxes. It was a hard, awkward squeeze, calculated above all to keep her there, not to let her leave. He knew that this could arouse her suspicions, since such public displays of intimacy were not at all characteristic of him, but he chose the lesser of the two consequences.

  “Oh, Joseph, dear, someone might come,” she said in a voice whose reproach was only feigned. “Be patient a little longer . . . ”

  Somewhere at the top of the street, from the direction of the square, dull thudding could be heard. It approached rapidly, mixing with the clatter of bouncing wheels. The sound was similar to thunder heard backward—from the dying out to the explosion. Mary tried to wriggle out and turn toward the window, but Joseph’s embrace held her tightly.

  “What was that?” she asked, turning her head to the side.

  “Nothing . . . a carriage, probably . . . in a hurry . . . ”

  If there was an end to his sentence, it was lost in the deafening stampede, in the strike of lightning. Just like the shadow of a low cloud, the unbridled team whizzed past the watchmaker’s shop in a whirlwind of hooves, wheels, manes, empty driver’s seat, foaming muzzles, spinning axles, terrified eyes, reins dragging on the ground, sweaty crupper—and afterwards the thunder resumed its natural course again.

  “Someone could get run over,” said Mary, after Joseph’s squeeze finally relaxed. Now he was standing almost penitently next to her, not knowing what to do with his hands that had held her like a vise a moment before.

  “Carriage drivers have become so inconsiderate, even arrogant. You should see them down in the town. They tear around like madmen. And how they whip those poor animals. It’s terrible.”

  “No one will get run over, Mary. Not anymore.”

  She looked at him suspiciously, confused by the changed tone of his voice. He had said it too seriously, as though pronouncing some kind of oath. Even so, as he uttered them, he was aware that they were merely empty words of comfort similar to those said to calm a child the first time he asks about death.

  Of course, someone would get run over. The inscription chiseled in granite could not be erased. On another fork of the tree of time he was now running into the street and bending in a convulsion of pain over the unmoving body, while tufts of yellow fluttered all around. He could pretend that this no longer concerned him, that he was now safe on this branch where Mary was standing next to him, the very incarnation of the vibrancy of life, sweaty, laughing, thirsty. But although he did not understand it much, the realization that both courses were equally real was painfully clear to him.

  The clarity with which he remembered the anguish he felt as he lifted her off the bloody pavement, heavy with lifelessness, the hopeless insensibility into which he then plunged for a long time afterward, the slow succession of months and years filled with the deceptive oblivion brought by tedious work, and the lonely, nightmare-filled nights in which the past relentlessly visited him, until that far-off November evening when the bells suddenly rang above the dark door to announce the arrival of the mysterious visitor—that clarity, that hard certainty of memory was the price he had to pay for this unique privilege that he had been given for who knew what reason: to return to a past time and undo the effects of cruel chance.

  He knew that this price did not give him the right to be dissatisfied. On the contrary, the shadow over his restored happiness was a very thin, transparent veil. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, only Mary’s intoxicating, infectious cheerfulness managed to dispel the mask of melancholy that periodically and for no apparent reason covered Joseph’s face.

  4. The Artist

  I

  He unlocked the door and entered the room.

  If it were not for the bars on the window, it would have looked just like an artist’s studio. The half-open window with the thick drapes and pleated curtains rose almost to the ceiling, letting in an abundance of light during the day. Painted white, the bars were not too conspicuous, but they could not be overlooked. They were not there to prevent anyone from escaping, for this was not a prison, but rather to prevent the final retreat that the mind of the room’s occupant might seek from its own darkness.

  The room was sparsely furnished. To the right of the window, at a slant, stood a rather large easel spotted with dried streaks of paint and placed on a covering of newspapers, yellowed from long exposure to the sun. Next to the wooden easel was a tall, thin chair with a low back and rungs for feet. Part of the lower half of the wall nearby was covered with mounted shelves that held a disarray of art supplies: mostly squeezed-out tubes of paint, half-empty little bottles of paint thinner, brushes of different sizes, dirty palettes, a bunch of used charcoal sticks and pencils, soiled flannel rags, large sketch pads, a pile of rolled-up canvases, and several cans with bright labels and no lids.

  The only light source turned on in the room was a reflector light on a short support attached to the middle of the ceiling.

  The narrow beam illuminated the canvas on the easel, reflecting brightly off the fresh layer of paint. The edges of the beam that reached the uncovered floor glistened off the polished parquet.

  He headed toward the other side of the room and sat on the end of a narrow bed with a brass frame, next to the door that led to the small bathroom. In addition to the bed, there was only a little white table with drawers: on it was a lamp with a yellow canvas shade, a vase with large-petaled purple flowers, and an old book with a black cover, pink-edged pages, and a wide ribbon as a bookmark.

  His eyes went to the wall facing the window. He could not see well in the semidarkness, but it made no difference. He knew what was there: three paintings in simple gray frames, unevenly arranged. Three scenes of darkness disrupted in the middle by a beam of light: the flickering glow of a torch in the corridor in front of a cell, cone-shaped lamplight illuminating a jumble of old things on an office desk, the green glow of the felt on a watchmaker’s counter. And outside the beam, distinct from the surrounding shadows like a concentration of the night, was a spectral figure without a face.

  “Good evening, Doctor.” She said it softly, with her back turned, sitting on the tall chair. All she had on was a short-sleeved nightgown; her fragile shape could be discerned through its thin, semitransparent fabric. The scene was not stable because the light material trembled and fluttered under the gusts of warm breeze from the window. Her bare feet with their small toes were resting on one of the rungs. The brush in her left hand was making rapid, short strokes about the canvas.

  “Good evening, Magdalena. The nurse tells me that you are painting again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it a bit late for that? Wouldn’t it be better for you to go to bed and then get down to work tomorrow morning?”

  “I can’t. I have to finish the painting as soon as possible.”

  “You were never in a hurry before.”

  “Now I have to.”

  “What for?”

  “He was here.”

  The doctor closed his eyes a moment and drew his fingertips across his forehead. “He came to visit you again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he tell you a new story?”

&nb
sp; “Yes. The last.”

  “The last?”

  “There will not be any more.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  She did not answer right away. In the silence that descended, distant sounds of the summer night were suddenly audible: the soft rustle of leaves in the tops of the tall trees surrounding the sanatorium, the idle chatter of crickets in the grass, the sharp call of a bird.

  “He’s leaving.”

  “Is that why you are in a hurry?”

  “Yes. I want him to see how I have painted him. He promised he would come one more time just for that.”

  “You are going to paint him? He finally showed himself to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he has always remained hidden before. You never once saw him during an earlier visit. That is why he has no face in your paintings. Why the change now?”

  “He will still remain hidden.”

  “How can that be if you paint him?”

  Before she replied, she dipped her brush in the paint on her palette, mixing colors for several long moments.

  “I’ll paint him, yes,” she said at last, returning the brush to the canvas. “I’ll even tell you all about him, if you wish. But of course, you won’t believe me.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because you think I’m crazy.” She said it evenly, as though stating the obvious. “My madness conceals him. Better than any darkness.”

  “You know that we do not use such words here.”

  “I know. You have other, milder expressions. But that does not change the essence of the matter. There are still bars on my window, and you keep the door locked.”