by A. S. Patric
The dog next door is barking his head off about something. Quiet usually, thank God. Not much of a guard dog for Mister Silvers. Charlemagne saw every human being as a potential friend instead of a possible enemy. A devastating hunter of possums however, and appreciated as such by the neighbours in the vicinity, who couldn’t legally kill the protected animals—despite the fact that cute little possums got into the walls of houses and screeched at any hour of the night with the spine-chilling effect of horror movie creatures.
The barking goes on for a while, as Jovan pushes his thoughts away from the hopelessness of the entire field of psychology for him, and the fear that all he feels on a daily basis will go on being felt in the same way for the rest of his life. He often thinks he has just enough strength to cope with a few more hours (sometimes it’s minutes or seconds) and yet the days keep coming relentlessly like those trains the other week at Slavko’s place. When he was young he might have played happily near the tracks like the cricket children. These days he feels as though he uses a rail for a pillow—always listening to the vague rumblings of oncoming annihilation.
He leans out of the cubicle and picks the towel off the open door of the vanity unit. Dries his thick black hair which silver has begun to glint through in the last year. Wipes down his torso, then his limbs, and steps out clean. Strange how little his body shows the evidence of his life. How rarely the flesh has been nicked by catastrophe. Almost no evidence in scarring outside a few abstract burn marks on his back. His stubble has gone white. It seems odd. When he shaves he becomes just another man living a quiet life in the suburbs.
He brushes his teeth, gingerly around the painful area in his jaw. Feels the fear building somewhere in the open space of his ribcage. Doesn’t have a thought or a reason attached to it. It comes and tears at his heart and lungs. He continues to brush. Spits out a little blood with his foam. Stands up and wipes his mouth with a hand towel. Can’t see it in his own face. When it fills his chest with a hundred crows, scrambling with their claws and beaks through black feathers for immediate release, even then, he can’t see it. It’s as though the past never writes itself into his features and expressions. Only that which ghosts behind the face can summon white-terror spectres and black-dread phantoms; the dead and living writhing in the muddy grave of his mind.
He puts his hand towel back on the rack. Breathes through it. Shrugs as he moves his head from the steel rail to let another train hurtle past. There is nothing those men who still have faith in the rational, as does David Dickens, could tell him about any of it. So he pushes his mind along to thoughts of Dr Graffito and what he might do next.
Jovan looks at his reflection in the mirror. He’ll stay that way, paused before his reflection for a few moments. Jovan will not reflect on the war. Those who have suffered a breakdown, such as Jovan has, often remember events during the crisis in chaotic clouds that roil through their minds. Flashes of lightning reveal electrified horror amid the details. The narrative sequence of Jovan’s life is not something he can lay out for himself.
The Serbs fought for Sarajevo from the hills and mountains of the surrounding Dinaric Alps. They were vilified for firing mortars into the city. For snipers taking shots at mourners at funerals. At musicians playing music for peace. At children skipping along the footpath or kicking a ball from one side of the street to the other. All of this happened. Yet this is also true: for the first time in tens of generations there are now almost no Serbs left alive in Sarajevo.
Jovan and Suzana were forced out of their homes during this civil war and then out of the university. Into a camp. Given food they thought was from the UN. It had been passed through different hands and it wasn’t clear who poisoned the food. It could have been Croats, Muslims or Serbs.
The result was the same. Suzana didn’t eat dinner, so no poison for her. For Jovan, the worst agony of his life as he struggled to go on breathing every minute of two weeks, eventually coming through some fifteen kilos lighter. His boy and his girl, his two children, were gone before nightfall of the first day, while he was burning in Hell. No one told Jovan until he stumbled out of the camp’s hospital a week after he was deemed recovered, which meant he was well enough to travel and it wouldn’t kill him.
They slowly made their way out of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Serbia on a trailer pulled along by a farm tractor, new maybe when Tito was still a young man. They didn’t speak about their boy or their girl on the journey. They never spoke about them when they got to Belgrade. Not with each other. Suzana’s family talked and cried with them. When they left the busted, burnt remains of Yugoslavia and came to Australia as refugees, the Brakochevichs went back to the trailer behind the old diesel tractor never moving faster than five kilometres an hour. A funeral procession of two. Never to reach its destination. Or it was two small bodies thrown into a group hole and eventually the trailer would tip two more bodies into it. What was there to talk about along the way?
Jovan is an articulate man and he wants to speak to his wife. What stops him time and again isn’t the pain, it’s a feeling that talking makes it trivial. Not that it makes it real—it makes it small. The reality is clear from when they open their eyes to when they close them, perforating even that boundary almost every night. The death of their two children isn’t the erasure of two beings. It is the loss of God and the skies, it is the loss of the past and the future, of all their small-voiced words and their hearts. The only possible response is suicide. To survive they have found a way to live without response.
Jovan opened a suitcase a few weeks ago. It was the day he came home from having attempted to clean the graffiti that said The Trojan Flea. He’d done the best he could but the glass couldn’t be made pristine again. The outlines of the words were still faintly visible when the light boxes were illuminated. The director chose to update to more modern X-ray viewing screens.
Jovan brought out their photos. He put them in frames. He set them on the chest of drawers in the bedroom. On the fridge in the kitchen. On the mantel in the lounge. He put them into more frames and hung them on walls in rooms and halls. They didn’t talk about the pictures. Suzana kept the glass clean in all of those frames Jovan placed around their home. The two dead children within them smiling.
He was four. She was six. They died within the same hour, eight years ago. Both born in Sarajevo. Their names were Dejan and Ana. And there’s nothing more that can be said about the dead that doesn’t make them small, lost and forgotten.
Jovan leans closer to the mirror. He runs a hand across the white stubble and remembers another birthday. A cake that Dejan and Ana made with the help of grandma Radmila. Wincing on some bites because eggshell had made it into the mixture. Eating it anyway because they kept asking how he was enjoying the crunchy birthday cake they’d baked for him. Jovan takes a breath that wavers on the exhalation and tells the reflection that he won’t shave today. Leaves the wet towel on the bathroom floor.
In the lounge, stuck to the front of a book he was reading last night, a note from Suzana. He lifts the book and reads: I’ve made an appointment for you with a dentist next Monday. You’re going to call in sick at the hospital that Monday. Or you can inform them now. This is not optional. I won’t listen to anymore moaning. I won’t hear anymore excuses. Consider yourself locked in. Consider yourself half-done with it. On another Post-it, which he won’t find until he’s reading his book at lunch, a quote from Cervantes stuck within the pages a little further along from where he’d stopped the night before: Every tooth in a man’s head is more valuable than a diamond.
He puts the book down, the note still stuck to it. He doesn’t screw it up and throw it away because she hasn’t written a note in all the time they’d been in Australia. Because he’d screwed up a million of them already. Because there was no calculating how many times she had left these kinds of notes around their flat on Pehlivanusha Street.
Post-it notes on the paper halfway through his typewriter on his desk, or on the centre of a televisio
n screen, at times a few of them, and some hanging from the screen from the day before, on the inside of the front door if it concerned something he should do before he left home, sometimes on the other side if it was the rubbish that had to be taken down, on the kettle, on the seat of the bike he’d use to ride to Uni. On the seat of the toilet or its water tank. The mirror in the bathroom if she wanted to share a quote with him: … Dame Dafina, otherworldly and radiant in a flurry of snowflakes and flames, in a mingling of Slavonian woods and heavenly constellations, saw the face of Vuk Isakovich. A quote from Migrations, by Milosh Tsernianski, a book she was reading for the fifth time. Or it was a quote from her favourite author, Ivo Andrich: You should not be afraid of human beings. I am not, only of what is inhuman in them. That one had been stuck to the book review section of the weekend newspaper, Liberation, that she knew he’d be reading as soon as he had the chance.
Anywhere she knew he would see it. Where it was unavoidable. He picks it up. The note about a dentist Monday. Folds it. Puts it into his wallet. Nods, and mumbles, ‘Monday. OK.’ He walks into the kitchen and prepares a quick breakfast, and does not think about the birthday cake, sitting inside the fridge as though it’s a bomb. The note on the fridge says: Dinner tonight. Restaurant by the sea.
On that same Friday morning, the optometrist, who everyone calls Miss Richards, is standing at her usual train station. She hasn’t brought her customary music or book. She has a ticket still worth over a thousand dollars because it’s a yearly pass. Hallam is a small, unmanned station on the Pakenham line. The V-Rail trains never stop there. She’s seen it speed through countless times. There has been a notion on many such occasions. It has always been a small idea barely the size of a full stop in whatever she was reading. She’s read that famous novel by Tolstoy and remembers the images of a flame being blown out and a book being closed. But it’s not as easy as that. Or poetic. It is more like a pig hung from its rear legs and getting its throat cut. It is a mutilation the splintering bones of her skeleton had never prepared for. It is a demolition of her soul her imagination could never have conceived. There is no book to close. There is no candle. Such absurdly poetic images for the pages of a story.
When Miss Richards leaps off the platform at Hallam, she hits the shiny, clean, steel rails and breaks bones in her wrists and knees, and then the impact of the train shatters everything else, and tears her meat into bits, and spatters her blood across the hot dry rocks of Hallam station. She is in all of those cells for an instant too long. For the briefest moment she knows what it is to come apart in millions of different directions, none of them a release or relief.
CHAPTER
THREE
A soft pattering sound against an upturned plastic bucket beyond the bedroom window peters out. Jovan notices the drizzle of rain only when it begins to ease off. He’s been dozing. Acid trickles through his veins as he wakes. It’s the reason Jovan rarely takes afternoon naps. The five-or ten-minute spells of unconsciousness he gets when fatigue overwhelms him are never restful. He keeps his body still. His limbs ordered. Palms folded atop his chest. Eyes closed and teeth unclenched. Breathing in slow, measured intervals. His heels balanced on the crease at the end of the mattress.
The house is empty. It sounds abandoned and feels hollow in a way only Sundays can. He swings his legs over the edge of the bed and blinks, waiting for the acid to leave his blood, hoping it’ll be sooner rather than later. Checks the clock for the time. Twenty-after-seven. Ten minutes before Suzana comes home from Black Rock. There’s a house out there she’s regularly attending to now. Not just cleaning—some cooking is required. A dinner tonight for the Coultas family of Prospect Grove that has her coming home so late. Seven-thirty, she said. Often, it’s later than promised. Promised was too strong a word for it. He wasn’t sure what word he should use.
While he waits for his nervous system to ease up, he watches Charlemagne stroll around his yard, roaming through the lemon trees and across the dry grass. The dog sniffs at a turd some eight centimetres long. One of many that Charlemagne has already left out there on Jovan’s lawn over the last few weeks. When they’re dry, they’re easy to scoop up with a shovel, but the days get away from Jovan. The grass doesn’t need much cutting at least. It’s an Australian type that creeps across the soil in a lattice rather than growing from individual blades. Perhaps it’s a weed that merely looks grasslike. Or maybe the grass evolved in this country to survive the regular droughts. Charlemagne stretches in the middle of the yard and opens his massive jaws for a huge yawn.
“Just look at that thing,” Jovan murmurs, feeling a burble of laughter dissolve in his chest without surfacing. “That’s a big fucking dog.”
Charlemagne is a shaggy behemoth, almost as tall as Jovan when he leaps up to put his paws on his shoulders. Children stop mid-stride when they see the dog. Heads stop talking in their cars and slowly turn as they drive by. Over a metre high at the shoulder, Charlemagne is about as tall as a good-sized pony. Obviously he eats about as much as one as well.
An Irish Wolfhound, his neighbour told him, when he came searching for his dog the first few times. A man of inverse proportions to his dog. Silvers would never have been big and, as he ages, seems smaller every year. More frail and withered, though he isn’t out of his fifties yet. There’s a slight depression above his right eye and it extends across his forehead and over the top of his skull. The circular shape marks an impact, the same way as the surface of the moon reveals an asteroid strike. A car crash years ago means Silvers trembles almost constantly and speaking more than a few sentences can often be difficult. Many words are impossible to say.
Silvers can still read, he assures Jovan. In the local paper there’s usually something Silvers can share with his neighbours. Most of his neighbours don’t want to speak with him for any length of time; some of them even swear at Silvers. Jovan talked with him for a while yesterday about the boy who caught a barracouta off the pier. Silvers told Jovan he has fishing rods that he hasn’t used for years, just sitting in his garage. Jovan explains he’s never been fishing and wouldn’t know the first thing about it. Silvers can’t work out where the pier is. He knows it’s not far away; within walking distance. He can’t work out which road leads to the ocean, so he wanders around the few streets he does know, and talks about barracouta with neighbours he catches when they’re getting out of their cars.
They shake hands every time they meet in Jovan’s drive. The small man puts out his jittery arm, giving him that one word to go along with it every time. ‘Silvers’. For a while Jovan thought it was a greeting rather than the man’s surname. His first name was only discovered by Jovan when Silvers’ wife came looking for him, and apologising for Charlemagne’s human-sized shits on the Brakochevich front yard. Looking for Bob again. And aren’t their names also in inverse proportions? “Funny,” murmurs Jovan again. “Look at that monster.”
A few minutes later Silvers stutter-walks into the yard across the road, and picks up the garden hose. Turns the tap on and starts watering the grass going blond in the Australian summer. No one around here seems to care about dry grass and mostly they let their lawns get what water they can from the skies, so Silvers goes from house to house in his neighbourhood watering the dying lawns.
Jovan sits on the edge of his bed feeling the acid run out of his blood. He can take deeper breaths now.
Memory of comfort, how easy, how quick, I forget myself.
When he comes out into his front yard it’s with his shovel and Charlemagne is happy to see him. He follows Jovan around as the shovel moves in swift slashes across the dry grass. Before he’s halfway though cleaning his lawn a car pulls up into the drive. A beat-up navy-blue Datsun 260c, as much of a bomb as Jovan’s panel van. The psychologist gets out of it. He’s told to get back in and park it in the street.
“Sorry. My wife come home soon and I want her to park on driveway,” Jovan explains as Dickens hobbles over. “What’s wrong with you legs?” Jovan asks.
“Ah.” Dickens waves his hand. “I fell down some stairs. Otherwise I would have walked here. I walk everywhere usually. Anyway, Friday morning I’m coming down stairs I’ve walked down three or four times every day for the last ten years without incident, and I missed the top step. Tumbled all the way down. Hurt my neck and coccyx, bruised some ribs, and sprained an ankle. My GP told me that I should consider myself lucky I didn’t break my neck. I felt I was unlucky to have tumbled down my stairs in the first place. You would have laughed if you saw it. It’s pretty disturbing to fall though. My first thought as I started to groan was an accusation, and a feeling of anger. I don’t know at who since I don’t believe in God. Certainly not a prankster god sticking out a foot when I wasn’t watching. I sometimes suspect that there is an atavistic blueprint for the mind that no matter what we do, we can’t really alter. Which is to say, two thousand years of social evolution and generations of civilization is a layer as thin across the psyche as the skin on boiled milk.”
Jovan steps back with fingers passing across his forehead.
Dickens leans forward slightly, saying, “I’m sorry to go on. I had a second cup of coffee today, and I really don’t think I should drink any coffee at all. I saw this experiment once, when they gave wood spiders various drugs like cocaine, heroin, THC, LSD, nicotine, etcetera, etcetera, to see the effect on this phenomenal web builder of a spider. Interesting results, though I don’t know how controlled the experiment actually was. In any case, the fascinating thing was that the wood spider given caffeine built exactly the kind of web he would have built without the caffeine, except very quickly. The actual effect on him was the most dramatic of all. I mean, more than cocaine or heroin. The other wood spiders continued to function after building their bizarre, drug-induced webs, but the caffeine spider went into a rocking, semi-catatonic state after completing his web. In human terms you could call it a complete psychotic breakdown. Oh my God! That thing’s coming at me! And I’m sore already. Don’t let it jump on me!”
