Impossible Stories

by Zoran Zivkovic

  The next fourteen Saturdays, all summer long, each time Mr Adam returned from the park he had one more painting to place on the wall next to the others. In time his brisk, almost frenetic painting became something of an attraction at the park, and a good many music-lovers would stand around to watch him work. He paid no attention to them. At the end of the music and painting he would quickly glance through those gathered around him, but never once did he catch sight of the slight figure in orange.

  When Mr Adam reached the park on the first Saturday in September, carrying his painting materials as usual, a surprise awaited him. The bandstand had disappeared as unexpectedly as it had arrived. It had been removed very carefully, leaving no trace behind—not even trampled grass. He darted in bewilderment around the spot where the little structure had stood, overcome by completely opposite feelings from those which had assailed him in the beginning. Now he missed the bandstand, and the environment seemed somehow naked and incomplete without it. For a moment he considered inquiring as to why it was no longer there, maybe even lodging a complaint, but he did not know where this should be done and in the end dropped the idea.

  He returned home in a dejected mood and sat in the armchair facing the wall covered with paintings. The canvases formed a large square: four paintings in four rows. He stayed there for seven full days, only leaving the armchair to take a quick bite or go to the bathroom. He even slept there in his clothes, but the brief, restless, erratic sleep did not refresh him. He changed the distribution of the paintings from time to time. During that long week filled with almost constant pouring rain, he tried all possible combinations of the sixteen canvases.

  On the evening of the following Saturday he got up from the armchair, stretched, and went to the window. Rays from the low sun in the western sky were cutting a path through patchy clouds, just like gleaming swords. He stayed there a while looking absently at the flickering play of light. Then he went to the wall and took down the paintings. He couldn’t carry them all at once and had to make two trips to the basement, where he left them.

  When he came up from the basement the second time, he went into the kitchen, took the large cookbook down from the shelf, opened it at the bookmark and became immersed in reading the recipe that was next in line. The following day was Sunday, his cooking day.

  16. The Violinist

  The professor knew he would not survive the night.

  Dr Dean did not tell him that, of course. At least not to his face. But his body language confirmed the inevitable.

  As usual, the doctor dropped by to see him at 23:10, after his shift was over. Before he entered the room, he spent a few minutes in the glass cubicle outside, talking quietly with the duty nurse, Mrs Roszel. They talked in low voices, periodically looking through the glass at the sick man’s bed. At one point Mrs Roszel shook her bowed head and raised clenched fingers to her eyes, as if to wipe away tears.

  When he appeared before the professor, Dr Dean tried his best to appear relaxed and cheerful, but he was not a very good actor. He must have had to play the role of false optimist many times in his long career, but the small things still gave him away. He avoided looking the professor in the eye, finding various excuses to turn his glance aside. He checked his pulse, though they both knew it served no purpose. Then he tightened and smoothed the bedclothes with brusque, nervous movements, which was also unnecessary and in any case Mrs Roszel’s job, which she performed frequently and expertly.

  Then he went to stand by the large window and stare out at the spring Princeton night. Gusts of rain beat against the pane, making ephemeral streaks that distorted the doctor’s dimly reflected face. He sighed, and told his patient that he actually envied him. What he wouldn’t give to be in his place! The professor was already in bed, but before the doctor lay a good half-hour’s drive through this foul weather, to be followed by at least another hour filled with various obligations, all to be discharged before he could finally go to bed himself. But such was life. Some people were lucky and some were not.

  He hesitated after saying this, because the conclusion was somehow inappropriate, given the circumstances. His intention had been to cheer the professor up and instil some hope, however unfounded, but it seemed he had inadvertently gone too far. It might have appeared cynical or even cruel to claim that someone whose hours were literally numbered was lucky. He turned from the window, and for the first time looked at his patient’s haggard face.

  The expression on it made the doctor feel foolish, for it told him that his acting had been as unsuitable as it was inept. He had seen that expression before, albeit rarely. The professor was not only conscious of what awaited him, but prepared for it. He did not expect any consolation, nor did he need it. This was no place for empty words.

  The doctor went up to the bed and shook the old man’s cold, slender hand. “Good night, Professor.” It took considerable effort to keep his voice from trembling.

  “Good-bye, Doctor.”

  Dr Dean gently patted the back of his patient’s hand with his free one. He tried to smile, but only managed a grimace. Then he turned and, more hastily than he liked or had intended, left the patient’s room. As he put on his raincoat and hat in the cubicle, he exchanged a few more words with Mrs Roszel.

  Ten minutes later the nurse went into the patient’s room to prepare him for the night. She began by giving him an oval blue pill. The Professor was given one every night before sleeping, and he would try to swallow it quickly with a little water because it tasted bitter. He took it as dutifully as ever, although he felt it was a pointless exercise. Not to have done so might have been awkward for Mrs Roszel, and she took care of him not only conscientiously but with affection.

  As she needlessly straightened his bedclothes, she murmured something about the rain that had been pouring ceaselessly since early afternoon. Then she went to the window and closed the curtains. The drumming of the heavy drops became suddenly muffled and distant. She went back to the bed and spent a few moments silently arranging the yellow wildflowers on his night table. It seemed as if she wanted to say something else, but was hesitating for some reason. When she left the room finally, still without saying it, the professor felt relieved. He did not feel like talking to Mrs Roszel right then.

  The nurse stopped at the entrance to her cubicle and turned off the strip light. “I’ll be here if you need anything, Professor,” she said softly. “Just call for me. Good night.”

  “Good night, Mrs Roszel.”

  He looked at her through the glass, sitting at her small desk. Now the only source of light in both rooms was a lamp with a thick yellow shade. Its dull glow made the white ribbon which kept the nurse’s hair off her forehead look like a golden aureole. She had lowered her head to read a book, without taking her usual last glance at her patient.

  The pill soon began to take effect. He first felt the dull, unremitting pain in his stomach soften to barely noticeable discomfort, as if a large pillow had been placed over his abdomen. Then the familiar feeling of floating began. Suddenly the bed seemed to disappear and he was lying in empty space, completely weightless. He knew it was only an illusion, but that did nothing to lessen the intoxicating pleasure of the feeling. Not even tonight.

  The floating would not last long. Before he fell asleep he would experience a brief feeling that his body had separated into an assembly of weakly connected spheres. Soundlessly, the fragile links between them would start to dissolve, and he would melt into nothingness, merging with the black infinity that surrounded him. His last conscious thought would be that this must be what dying was like. Courtesy of the blue pill, he had died every night since his arrival at the hospital.

  Come morning he would wake in a bad mood. It bothered him that he was not afraid of dying. Death seemed somehow attractive; it was almost as if he wanted to die, and he felt that he should not feel like that. If for no other reason, he hoped he would not die before finding the answers to several questions that had plagued him throughout his adult
life. It would be quite unjust if he were denied them—but perhaps the world was only orderly, and not just. Certainly, there was very little time left for justice to be done.

  On this occasion, however, he did not break up into spheres. He was prevented by the sudden intrusion of music. It was barely audible but certainly present, though he could not determine the source; it seemed to come from all around him. Mrs Roszel kept a small radio on her desk, but she would never play it this late. He looked in the nurse’s direction. She was still engrossed in her book, apparently not hearing a thing.

  A violin was weaving a slow, almost dreamy melody. He did not recognize it at once though he had played the violin since childhood, but something stirred in the depths of his memory, striving to reach the surface. For a despairing moment he thought it would fail; that the memory, like so many others, would stay bound forever below the thick webbing that enveloped his aged mind. Then the sound, as if wanting to help, grew a tiny bit louder—and a bolt of lightning flashed through the gap of sixty years, taking him back to that long-ago summer day in northern Italy.

  The small town in which he found himself as he walked the back roads from Milan to Genoa seemed to be completely deserted, even here on the main square, but this did not surprise him. All small places give such an impression during the siesta hour between two and four o’clock in the afternoon, when the inhabitants retreat from the unbearable heat into the shuttered cool of their homes.

  This did not bother him very much. The fewer local people he ran into, the fewer difficulties he would have. He was a shy fifteen-year-old, and he found the language difficult. Almost no one understood his native German, and he had only a very limited command of the melodious speech of this area, with its open, resonant vowels. So he took pains to enter into conversation with people only when necessary, shrinking from their presumed distaste for his accent that must sound to them like the screech of rusty gears.

  The piazza was approximately square in shape, with a small fountain in the middle. The young man put his canvas rucksack on the ground and started to fill his cupped hands with water from the arching stream. He splashed his face with water, letting it drip, and then looked around, head raised, squinting at the white stone façades. His eyes, used to the monotonous greyness of northern lands, constantly ached from the bright colours of Italy. Everything around him was vibrating, twinkling, glimmering, bursting. He had the feeling of being trapped in a crystal that absorbed light from all sides, but did not let it out again.

  The silence was suddenly broken by the sound of a violin. It came from the top of a wide, three-storey building that was separated from the church belfry by an extremely narrow, shaded street. The window in the garret was open, probably the only one unshuttered on the whole square, and in the room behind it someone had chosen to fill this stagnant, bright, deserted hour with music. It was not a student practising, but an experienced violinist, a master whose fingers had total command of the instrument.

  The chance listener next to the fountain stared, enchanted, at the high window. Even had he not been a skilled violinist himself, there was no way he could have remained unaffected. Cascades of pure harmony streamed down from above as if from heaven. They penetrated deep inside him, to the very centre of his being, where they created resonant reflections. To devote his utmost concentration to listening, he closed his eyes.

  He was trying to expel the omnipresent light to take best advantage of the sound, but without success. The light did not disappear under his lowered eyelids. Not only was it still there, it suppressed everything else with the power of its unabated radiance. And then, in a moment of revelation, he understood. The light was still there because that was what the music was all about. Could there be anything more fitting? What was invoked could not have been presented to him so comprehensively by any other means. He was inside the light, and its secrets started to peel away before him, finally displaying the wondrous simplicity of its essence.

  He stayed there so long, motionless, listening to the light, that he lost track of time. Something very strange had happened to time. Its course seemed to decelerate, gradually at first, then exponentially, until it finally stopped, frozen in a timeless ray that rushed through strangely distorted space. Under the tremendous pressure of light, space started to undulate, turn and twist, until it was transformed into a vortex that carried him, powerfully and irresistibly, towards the black point deep within its centre. The point became a circle, then a wide opening in the fabric of reality, then an immense pit of deepest night, sucking him into itself like a speck of dust.

  When he came to his senses he was at first uncertain where he was. For a moment he thought he was still in the heart of darkness, but then he realized it was not total, for it was pierced by sunbeams that slanted like sparkling spears through narrow windows in a thick stone wall. The rays were multicoloured because of the stained glass they had passed through. The music had ceased.

  The young man realized he was lying on something cold and hard. He tried to get up, but a pair of hands appeared and gently but firmly pushed him back. A figure in a brown mantle bent over him; it was a priest, with greying hair and beard, wearing small, round, wire-rimmed glasses. He smiled at the young man and then began to speak. The young man could make out only a few words in the deluge of Italian: sun, fall, brought into the church.

  He started to get up again, hastily explaining to the priest that he had to return to the square as soon as possible so as to hear the remainder of the music of light—it meant so much to him. Otherwise he was fine, there was no need to worry: he had experienced enlightenment, not sunstroke. The priest’s only reply was an uncomprehending shrug, but this time there was no need for the priest’s hands to stop him from getting up. He had not even reached a sitting position when his head started to swim. Overcome by exhaustion, he lay back down on the marble platform by the wall of the church on which they had laid him when they brought him in.

  The priest reached for the wet cloth on the weary traveller’s forehead and started to wipe it over his cheeks and neck. He was still talking, but the young man could make even less sense of it than before. He stopped listening, as despair filled his soul. If only he had stayed there a little longer! If only that vortex hadn’t whisked him away so soon, he could have grasped the essence of light. As it was, he could only remember broken fragments, loose threads from the tapestry, pebbles detached from the mosaic. But at least he knew the mosaic existed and that it was flawless in its irreducible, self-evident necessity. Yet it seemed he had no right to hope ever to see it again, though he knew that he would devote the rest of his life to its tireless pursuit.

  It was sunset when he left the church. He still felt a bit light-headed, but he had to be on his way. The piazza was now full of people, and the shutters on the windows stood wide. All but one. He spent some time before the entrance to the three-storey building, whose highest window was now only a blind, mute eye, but in the end he did not seek out the musician in the garret. It was not his poor knowledge of Italian that prevented him, for he would have done the same thing if he could have spoken German. What could he say to the Violinist, in any language? Moreover, he suspected that He was no longer there at all.

  There was no radiance this time. Here in the gloom of the hospital room, he no longer had to close his eyes to listen to the message of the music. The thrill he had experienced once, so long ago, was not here, nor would it have suited this period of his life or his present circumstances. All that he felt, aside from the intoxicating effect of the blue pill, was a moment of happiness coursing gently through him, stemming from the knowledge that there was justice in the world, after all.

  The great mosaic appeared before him, woven from vibrating threads of air. It was almost completely filled in. He knew perfectly well which pebbles were missing. He had not been allowed to find them himself, as he had the others, but that no longer mattered; he had long ago discarded vanity. All that mattered was to see them at last, during the short
time that remained to him.

  The violin began to build shapes out of sound that slotted perfectly into the empty spaces. Each part represented a distinct revelation: amazingly simple, magnificently complex, wondrously unbelievable, insanely unacceptable. Now he understood why he would never have been able to find some of the answers. He simply did not have the right questions.

  When the grand architecture of tones was finally complete, he had to confront its most disturbing characteristic: the whole and its parts were not in harmony. When he focused on the whole, the parts became fuzzy—and vice versa. He could not concentrate his internal eye on both at the same time. Once everything inside him would have rebelled at this imperfection, but not any longer: it was his preconceptions that had been wrong, of course. The world did not have to be orderly, at least not in the way he had imagined it. The Violinist based his composition on completely different principles.

  He did not realize at first that the music had stopped. It was only when the mosaic came apart, giving way to the dark space it had temporarily occupied, that he became aware of the silence. He lay there confused for several moments, staring in front of him. Something must surely follow, this seemed inevitable. Death, perhaps? Was there any moment more suitable to die? But nothing happened. The spheres were still tightly grouped together.