Diary of Interrupted Days

by Dragan Todorovic

  “But I’m laughing on the inside,” Sara said.

  Note: Face

  My face is a good face. It never betrays me. It lets me sit comfortably behind it and does not call for me unless it’s necessary. It is made of elastic material that is resistant to most atmospheric influences. My face can take an insult, an injury, and it will repair itself and be like new again.

  I can wash it, shave it, slap it, pinch it, steam it, wipe it, I can even cut it, and it will still be my face. I am not sure how, but people recognize me by my face. It keeps changing, but they can still distinguish me by it. I’ve had three different moustaches, and five different beards, and I was still me. I’ve plucked my eyebrows, I’ve shaved my sideburns and trimmed my hair, and yet still people know me.

  There is nothing different from anyone else about my face. Two eyes, two eyebrows, a nose, a mouth, and cheeks—everyone has the same things. When I make a face, it is anyone’s expression. It is the same pattern repeated five billion times all over the globe, yet humans are capable of recognizing a particular pattern as a person’s private mould. Maybe that is what makes us unique as a species—not language, not history, not religion, but our ability to recognize faces.

  That’s why we invented masks.

  —T.O., November 3, 1993

  THE SAME SILENT MUSIC. November 9, 1993

  Sara was supposed to come home that day around two, and Boris decided to take a walk to his favourite delicatessen and get something nice for lunch.

  He came to the corner of Isabella and Church, then, on a whim, crossed Church Street, walked a few blocks east, then south on Sherbourne, and returned by Wellesley Street to the store. It was a Friday, cold but sunny, and he felt a glow envelop him, making him light and bearable. Watching gay couples around him walking hand in hand, something unimaginable where he came from, he suddenly felt that he really had crossed the ocean, that he had arrived—whatever that meant—and he could hardly wait to share this feeling with Sara.

  He bought a bag of groceries, and took the long way back home. Instead of going north, towards his street, he walked west, towards Yonge.

  If he told someone in Belgrade that he was elated by watching men holding hands on the streets, they would think he had become gay. If he wrote a letter, now, to a friend back there, what would he write? He realized it would have to be a group of scenes, not a narrative. A scene of their first encounter with the city. A scene in IKEA. Another in a huge supermarket. A Yorkville scene. The Halloween scene, which was maybe even an act. All written as a movie script. Exterior. Day. Busy corner in an upscale neighbourhood. Interior. Night. Thoughts flapping in all directions, searching for ways to keep his head above water.

  There is no narrative of exile. There are poems of exile, long successions of short verses, plenty of metaphors, abbreviations, aberrations, abeyances. Exile is not transferable. It is a chopped-up existence. Exiles live their days as a series of small coloured stones whose final order is never fully revealed to them. The mosaic they create in the end will be visible only to their descendants.

  Against the wall of a clothing boutique, a rectangular bundle of paper caught his attention. He picked it up. He was still not entirely familiar with Canadian banknotes, but it does not take much to recognize money on the street.

  Judging by the colour, these banknotes were not small denominations. To his surprise, he was not happy. Why did it have to be him to find the money when so many people had passed by? Because he kept staring at the sidewalk in front of him like an old man. Immigrants and the old: exiles from life. Frail, vulnerable, futureless. All his life he had looked people straight in the eyes, but here he had suddenly stopped. You don’t have to carry hellos with you. But hellos are anchors. They keep you glued to the ground. With nobody who was familiar to greet, he had cut off all eye contact, hacking through faces straight to the asphalt beneath him. The asphalt was the same in Belgrade, Amsterdam, London, Prague, Barcelona. Sometimes more spittle, sometimes less, sometimes more trash, sometimes less ammonia—it was the same map of the same dance steps. The same silent music.

  This was his present—when you do not look at faces but at sidewalks, when you are searching for a recognizable sound, when people are around you but you are not among them. This was why he was excited about finding the money, but not happy.

  He went into a store that sold art materials to buy a few sheets of drawing paper. At the cashier, he took out the money and unfolded it. Three bills of twenty dollars each. He paid, took his paper, and walked out. As he was putting the money back in his pocket, he let a fiver fall on the sidewalk. He crossed the street to a coffee shop, bought himself an espresso, and found a chair in the window facing the art store.

  After almost an hour, a man picked up the money. Boris hurried after him.

  “Excuse me, do you have a minute? I saw you find that money, and I thought you must be a newcomer like me, and—”

  “Fuck off, faggot,” the man said, raising his middle finger.

  TWINS. November 16, 1993

  Sara stood by the store window, looking out. It was Tuesday, mid-November. The air was crisp. The low sun shone on the buildings across the street, and Yonge was already filling up with the rush-hour crowd, although it was only several minutes past three. Tucked away behind several cameras on display and cardboard ads for new models, she was studying the faces of the passersby. From time to time she recognized Slavic features, and a few people, she thought, might even be Serbs.

  A customer entered, but she judged him to be a browser and let another clerk take over. She had already sold a few expensive cameras that afternoon, mostly to American tourists, and she was content with her earnings for the day.

  The man left and the two other clerks started chatting. Sara continued to watch the street. One or two faces, she thought, were types easily found here and everywhere, but some were not. She remembered the doppelgänger legend, but that was too ominous, too scary for her taste. This was something else: perhaps everyone had their twin somewhere far away, and between them there was a balance of pleasure, an equilibrium of success, of riches, of health. Sitting on the same see-saw, on opposite sides of the world, the twins go up and down, down and up, one feeling good, the other one miserable with the flu, one struggling to buy food, the other renovating a villa in Tuscany. One losing a loved one, the other discovering that she is pregnant. With someone who was never there, a total stranger, past before ever becoming present.

  Luz entered the store like a moving shadow, in a long black coat, a dark hat, and black boots. She nodded to the other girls, who nodded back, and went straight upstairs to her husband’s office. Sara left her position by the window and went to the cage. She filled the electric kettle with fresh water and pressed the button.

  Luz came in.

  “Are you in here all the time, or do you work sometimes?”

  “I’m making you some tea,” Sara said.

  Luz took off her coat and hat and threw them towards the coat rack in the corner. She missed and they ended up in a heap on the floor. Sara hung them up. When she turned around, Luz was on the couch, her hands covering her face. Sara poured the tea into two cups and sat by Luz, holding them. For a minute or two, nothing happened. Then, slowly, Luz extended her hand and took a cup. She did not try to hide the tears.

  “Not a good day?”

  They drank tea in silence.

  “What happened?”

  “I went to the doctor. He increased my dose.”

  Silence, again.

  “Have you ever fainted?” Luz asked.

  “Once, when I was sixteen. I forgot to have breakfast. And lunch. I was in love.”

  “Did the world spin around you?”

  “It did. It went fast.”

  “You are lucky, then. It never spun around me. I was always in the wrong place, never in the centre. I am a moon, Sara. I orbit this world. When you find me on the couch, that’s what it is: I will fall off if I do not lie down.”

 
; Pause.

  “How long have you been here?” Sara asked.

  “Sixteen years. Some people emigrate and are fine in a year, some are never fine. You don’t fit. You’re bent and the new space was made for straight, for upright.”

  “I feel bent,” Sara said.

  “All new immigrants do. Look at them. They have fear in their eyes. They are trying to keep their balance. They think they will fall if they straighten up. Even when they faint, the world does not revolve around them.”

  Luz started crying again in complete silence, without sobbing, without sighs, without covering her face. Sara put her cup on the floor and hugged her without thinking.

  She is an expert at crying, Sara thought. A tear rolled down Sara’s cheek, too, stealthily. Another followed. Is she crying because of Luz? Impossible. Another tear.

  “Are you afraid of returning home?” Luz asked quietly.

  “I just came here, I’m not even thinking about returning.”

  “That fear—that is your prison. Once you emigrate, you start thinking that returning home would mean defeat. But if you become locked inside that, you will accept anything that life throws your way.”

  “When you fly across half the world,” Sara said, “you expect your troubles to stay behind to dry up and die. But they arrive before you, they make your bed, they await you in your mirror.”

  “I used to be a writer back in Brazil,” Luz said. “I published two books before I came to Canada. Two good books. And then my mind just snapped. As if the move was just too much. You know—when too much happens to you, you can’t write anymore. Your drain is plugged—your dirty water is drowning you. If I don’t take my pills, I have horrible visions. People are dying in my head, my closest friends, people are being disfigured, I do it to them. I can’t write about what I see, Sara, because I don’t want to pass it on to anyone. And I can’t go back to Brazil like this. It would feel like a defeat.”

  The two women sat on the couch, crying. Their breathing soon became coordinated, and had someone blind entered the room, he would have thought that there was only one person inside.

  Note: Two shadows from one light

  There was a party in Belgrade a long time ago. The hostess invited a woman who read tarot. I don’t like that stuff, so I avoided sitting at the table across from her as long as I could. In the end, it became obvious to me that the hostess would take it personally if I did not take part in her plan, so I took a drink with me and sat down.

  “I see you walking with two shadows from the same light,” the tarot reader told me.

  That sentence has been drilling into my brain ever since. Now I know what she meant. My shadows have names.

  —T.O., December 29, 1993

  ASKA AND WOLF. May 10, 1994

  Boris had never written his résumé because he had never applied for a job. A résumé was a dry, precise form, tailored for engineers, not artists, on which he was to list his previous engagements, in descending order, his education, also going backwards, his goals and his general qualities. He tried but did not want to fit everything on one page. His life seemed too small on a single sheet. It scared him.

  He was tempted to drift into fiction. Who would know? Who would be the witness? Isn’t that the purpose of emigration? He could reinvent himself and he could round off the edges a bit, fill in the gaps, paint the walls that life had built around him. Some writers do it. Spies do it all the time. What do they call it—creating a legend? Precisely. He was an artist. Fiction was his legitimate tool.

  But when he printed a version that he’d invented and the strictness of the paper replaced the fluidity of the screen, he was disgusted. Not with the lies but with what the lies meant. Uprooted, he had to fight hard for his past, for every memento, every picture, for every treasured moment. The lies blurred his life, corroded reality, let rust take over, made everything the colour of shit.

  He wiped his résumé clean of all inventions.

  The man was reading Boris’s résumé, printed on a yellowish cotton paper as had been recommended in the library book. Boris fought the urge to explain what he meant by each paragraph, and kept silent. They were sitting in a café at Yonge and Bloor. A blond Russian waitress with a low-cut blouse brought them their espressos. The man studying his résumé was in his early forties, apparently in casual clothes. But the longer Boris looked at him, the more he realized how carefully he had dressed. His shirt exactly matched his blue eyes; the signet ring on his right pinkie and his watch were silver. He wore jeans, but the material suggested an expensive designer.

  The man laughed. “This is a perfect résumé if the job was to join a revolutionary cell in South America.”

  Of course. Who would give a job to someone who spent his life doing conceptual art?

  “How come they didn’t arrest you? Man, this is awesome. You glued your president’s picture to a papier-mâché dick. What for?”

  “So people could admire and bow to their idol.”

  “That would never work here. Our prime minister is very tall. It would take too much paper, wipe out a minor rainforest.” The man emptied a pouch of brown sugar into his cup and stirred it, looking at Boris. “Have you ever worked in advertising?”

  “Lately, all our political work in Belgrade might as well have been a form of advertising,” Boris said.

  “Sure, sure,” the man said.

  Boris was desperately trying to remember his name. Chris? Bill? Richard? Dan? He had introduced himself when they met at his office on the twenty-ninth floor of the building towering above them, but Boris was bad with names.

  “And this,” said the man, slapping the paper in his hand, “the musical gallows, that’s great.”

  Boris felt awkward. The man stopped laughing, took a sip of coffee, said, “I think we could find something for you,” then looked briefly at the top corner of the résumé before adding, “Boris.”

  Boris could not believe it. “That would be great.”

  “Of course, you don’t have Canadian experience—you’ve been here, what, only three months? But we could prolong the probation period, and that would cover us.”

  The man pursed his lips. “How about this: you get a position as a senior graphic designer. That would practically mean you could work as an art director, since you would have junior people to execute the design for you, and it wouldn’t draw too much attention to your background. After the probation period is over—say, in a year—we would drag you one floor up, pair you with a writer, and give you a proper title. Now, the tricky part is your salary. What did you have in mind?”

  Boris had read about this moment, but he still was not ready.

  “Come on, Boris, don’t be shy,” the man urged.

  “I was thinking thirty … five,” Boris said quietly.

  “Thirty-five,” the man repeated slowly. “Yeah, I think we can live with that. So, can you start this Monday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Welcome aboard, Boris. You will love our agency, you’ll see. It’s not for nothing that ODG operates on five continents and is looking for the sixth.” He laughed at his own joke and stood up, extending his hand. “Pleasure, Boris.”

  “Thank you …”

  The man smiled. “Johnny. You can call me Johnny, Boris.” Boris squeezed his hand hard.

  For the first few weeks, Boris had to learn so many things that his mind was numb by the end of the day. The proper use of a workstation, how to file new material, procedures (explained by those who had offices) and ways to circumvent them (explained by those in cubicles), the company infrastructure, the history of specific clients, and names, names, names. For the most part, his co-workers were friendly, but he did not want to test their patience and tried learning as much as he could by watching them, rather than asking. Many of them wanted to know more about the war in his old country, and he always answered with as much detail as he judged would not bore the listener.

  He slowly fell into the space opened for him and he was
given some serious projects. He took Sara to an exclusive restaurant on Yorkville Avenue for a celebratory dinner. All was going well, except for the pattern of terrible headaches that had developed during his seventh week.

  He would get to work at nine, carry on with the design of the current project, answer some phone calls and his email, talk to the colleagues in the cubicles next to his or just listen to their chatter—it was all interesting. Around lunchtime, a throbbing just behind his forehead announced the arrival of the pain that soon hit his temples with brutal force and stayed there until evening. He tried the first line of painkillers, then those marked extra-strength, without success. His doctor, an older woman who made a big fuss about his smoking, finally agreed to prescribe something with codeine, and that worked. But the pills were mildly hallucinogenic, and he couldn’t continue to work drugged and constipated. He put off taking his pills till the end of the day.

  Sara had found some books in Serbian in the back of a bin in a second-hand bookstore on Yonge, and one day he took an old paperback, written by Ivo Andrić, a Serbian Nobel laureate, with him to work. Among the collection of stories was Boris’s favourite allegory, “Aska and Wolf,” about a lamb who could dance beautifully. One day, Aska the lamb gets lost in the forest and meets a big bad wolf who is clearly planning to eat her. Aska starts dancing to say goodbye to this world, and the wolf becomes entranced and keeps postponing the kill. She dances long enough for the shepherds to come and save her, surviving only because of her art.

  That day, his head already throbbing, he took the book with him to lunch two blocks away, at a small restaurant hidden behind a building on a side street where his colleagues rarely went. The owner and his wife, a Middle Eastern couple, were the only employees. She cooked all the food—mostly Italian dishes—and he served and worked at the counter. Boris took his ravioli to the small smoking section in the back and opened his book.