Black Rock White City

by A. S. Patric

  A quick nod of his head. He looks afraid that the next thing Suzana says to him will be an insult. A skittish smile fails to take hold on his face. “We can do that. What day should we make pay day? What day is good for you?”

  “Whatever day is good for you,” she says. Gets into the cabin of the van. Coultas goes on standing there, gathering glimmering beads of rainwater in his black beard. “It doesn’t matter for me. You pick the day.”

  He says, “Sure, well, we’ll make it Wednesdays. From now on. Oh-kay.” He has about ten ways of saying OK. “So OK. I’ll see you tomorrow at about three.”

  “It can’t be before four. That will have to be enough time for everything.” She stumbles slightly on be be four four.

  “Four? Oscar gets home at quarter past four. Yet you’ll be here at four. That’s barely enough time. But OK. Sure. O’Kay.” She doesn’t know what is Coultas-with-her, and what is Coultas-himself. Is it possible that he has this desperate edginess to his eyes when he talks with people in general? As though he wants to tell them something that might make all the difference in their lives, his life, to life in general? And if only he can articulate the thought, he can share the news, and somehow a fresh accord will be brought about in the world. Why does he continue to stand there, a fool collecting raindrops in his beard?

  “So I’ll see you then.” The indigo shirt he is wearing, an evening sky gathering black stars. His glasses spattered with droplets. She reaches to pull the door closed. To hell with the idiot. Coultas is now leaning forward, a nervous waiter with a question for a seated patron.

  Amazing that this man is a lecturer at the University of Melbourne. How does he survive amongst the brash students plucking the feathers of his knowledge to stuff their toys with, leaving only mockery for the naked, trembling man beneath? There has to be a costume he puts on when he goes to his university and walks into a lecture theatre. He cannot lean forward there with this weak uncertain smile on his face. Or, it’s possible things are different in this country. Maybe the students go to university in sedate lines and quietly absorb his lessons with patient questions and feel no need to test his mettle. That had never been her experience as a student or teacher.

  He says, “I also wanted to thank you. For doing … what you’re doing … for Rae.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” A kick in that word rather than a caress. “Go inside now.” He walks away, raising an arm in farewell and then letting it drop. She puts the key into the ignition. She doesn’t turn it. She watches the water on the windshield gather and run in rivulets.

  Coultas makes her think of Belgrade, and of course, the Demon. It’s the contrast between the two lecturers, yet she knows how many things got her around to thinking about that son of a bitch, Vladimir Mitrovich. How is it that a man can become a devil even before he’s dead? Entering a woman’s ear and living in the grey whorls of her brain—a gleaming red imp with a sharp little cheese fork. The two long thin prongs perfect for skewering a precise memory and forcing it down her throat.

  Moving into that Belgrade lecture theatre as if he was the man a whole generation had been waiting for. To the board, and chalk, writing across two metres of it in slashing letters the words:

  Vladimir

  Mitrović

  And then standing there—glaring at his students. A long (maybe it was only twenty seconds but it felt like twenty minutes) staring contest with every one of the first-year history students new to the University of Belgrade.

  “If there is any doubt in your minds that excellence is possible, here in this room right now, I want you to leave. If you bring me a conquered mind and a cowed soul, I want you to take them back out with you. Spill your drivelling words of defeat out in the halls. Do not bring me this fucking cooler-than-thou attitude packaged as the sneer of a hipper generation above the bullshit of the past. I want you to pack up your fucking books and get the fuck out of here.” Speaking with an incomprehensible rage. “I do not want your masquerades of glamorised ignorance and parades of chic stupidity. Here we have the possibility of greatness. You will approach knowing you know fuck all, and that you may be pathetic and pitiful, but that all you need to do is see a fire. All you need to do is see it. And if you can see it, you will be able to take a light from it back with you into the dim cold cavern of your brain and illuminate the walls of a cultural and genetic memory that is your birthright as a member of the most powerful, awe-inspiring species to have emerged in the millions of years this planet has been churning out life—from the pterodactyl to the AIDS virus. I will show you the fire at the centre of history. Not only our history as Serbs, simmering in the cauldron of Europe above the burning coals of the Middle East, but also, our story as human beings, the history of a Godless planet in the galactic void of brainless stars and lifeless dust, creating God from our own molten blood.”

  And then he stands there again, motionless except for his eyes, and looks at his students blinking back at him. Standing within a philosophical battlefield, surrounded by the glorious, fluttering battle flags and pennants of his words. A mad general looking to enlist an army of insanity on the possibility of true vision.

  The history lecturer had then wiped away his name and had written in its place:

  The Engine of Evolution

  The Drive of Divinity

  He asked the class to begin writing as he continued to watch, moving amongst them. He stood over those that dawdled, until they began scribbling. One that sat there, a rabbit in his headlights, had a finger placed in her collar, and was yanked out of the class. Readmitted later when she was able to respond to the anomalous eight words written without explanation on the blackboard.

  Suzana didn’t know then that those who most closely resemble angels are those who are the most powerful demons. All she could see of Vladimir Mitrovich was the halo of an explosion from his fusion-powered mind.

  Her own response in that essay, on that first day, was a black stream of words that could have flowed as an ink vein through the rest of the year and still broader and longer, flowing on through the rest of her life. Because she did indeed see the fire in the cave in that instant. Understood the miracle within the curse the history lecturer was referring to. Knew it intimately even though she’d discovered it for the first time, cleanly and clearly, and was ready to flow through, on into the ancient black inkwell heart of the planet itself.

  “You alright?” Coultas stands by her window again. His shirt dark with rainwater. “Are you Okay?” He talks from beyond the closed window.

  She winds the window down a few centimetres. “Yes. Fine. I was thinking.” He goes on standing there. She starts the van and it roars into life, then stutters, so that she has to feed it big gulps of petrol. Jovan tells her that she should run it for a minute to give the engine a chance to warm up. Usually she forces it to grumble and grind along, warming up on its own time. She wants the fucking thing to die, though she couldn’t kill it if she tried. Whatever happens to the Ford, Jovan repairs it. He took the whole engine apart and rebuilt it when he bought it. She’d have to burn it by the light of a full moon and hammer a solid-silver stake through its carburettor to destroy it.

  She asks Glen Coultas if he is ever overcome by memories, above the dying engine of the Ford, which falls silent after she’s asked her question.

  For a moment he seems to understand. Perhaps he hasn’t heard clearly because he shakes his head and says, “You can park in the garage from now on. OK. He passes her a clicker for the automatic door through the open part of the window. “Oh-kay! So I’ll see you tomorrow.” Glen Coultas waits for her to drive away. Waves at her in her rear-view mirror. Standing in the drizzle. The old Ford roars on through the nice suburban streets of Black Rock, the anti-Christ of ice cream vans.

  Five minutes down the road her mobile starts ringing. Jelka again. There is a record of five missed messages during the day, and she’s already talked to her twice in the morning. Jelka wanting Suzana to come over to her place in Seaford on her way
home. It’s a left and a right off Nepean Highway yet it isn’t as easy as that to make the turns for Suzana. It isn’t easy to drive on towards Reservoir Road, Frankston, either. Sometimes it’s easier to just drive anywhere else rather than where she is expected. She almost laughs at the thought of making a getaway in the Ford panel van.

  As she nears Station Street she makes the left without deciding to. Makes the right onto Chapman Street and stops in front of Jelka’s house. The engine threatens to stall but doesn’t. Idles with hiccups that has something to do with timing. Jovan has explained it to her; never clearly enough for her to understand why it can never be fixed. It’s something he seems to need to adjust every few weeks. So it runs to rumbles and she switches it off and listens to it die out with a shudder. Sits and listens to the car make ticking noises.

  Hands on the wheel. Looking at the street lights on Chapman Street that shine out for no good reason. No one around here goes out for walks. Dogs barking from every barricaded backyard. Children ensconced before their glowing screens behind the walls. Family cars left out on the streets make her think of discarded bits of clothing, forgotten shoes to be picked up when needed the next day for school or work. All of it done tiredly, against the will, with an obligation that works on them like a disease. People around here collapse into bed at the end of the day. They rise every morning with their cheap suburban alarms forcing them out again.

  No, she knows this isn’t objective. This isn’t the life around her as much as the poisoned life within her. She’s seeing reflections. There are the street lights beyond the rain-spattered windshield, with their useless illumination over patched bitumen streets and cracked footpaths. Behind one window, a child with a blue zombie face stares at the screen of a computer as though he’d been there hours already and would spend hours more, lost in a comfortable oblivion. Wasn’t it possible it was just a child having fun, playing a computer game, and what was wrong with that? And if it is indeed subjective, she wants to know how she can look at things around here and find a more satisfying, objective picture to dwell on. All she can see is this suburban wasteland. Feel herself within it trying to find a way to live. Perhaps it’s in the way each bead of water on the windshield spins the lights in ‘its microscopic heart’—a line from one of Jovan’s poems.

  She knows that Jovan used to be able to turn almost anything over to a new perspective, see something deeper, redeeming, more beautiful even if pitiful. It was what made him such a superb poet back in Yugoslavia. And it still takes her breath away, an actual gasp of air at the top of her lungs, when she thinks how crucial poetry used to be to him. How Jovan used to wake in the mornings with poetry emerging in rhapsodies. How it used to drive him, his body slumping over a bedside table and writing with eyes that couldn’t open from sleep, and with a drowsy hand, poetry that cut through all the usual bullshit poetry was, the usual mediocrity, and opened up new ways of feeling, seeing, understanding and being. And now nothing. He doesn’t write anymore and it’s as though he never did.

  She gets out and walks up the drive to the door. The street lights don’t buzz in Seaford, though she remembers now that it was Jovan that came up with the line about street lights that resembled the glow of fireflies left in a jar too long. Perhaps he’d seen fireflies when he was a child in Banja Luka. They certainly weren’t around Zemun, her corner of Belgrade. The door opens before she gets a chance to knock. Her friend is already stepping outside to give her a hug. Not an embrace as such. Jelka places both hands on Suzana’s shoulders to halt her. Making as if to kiss Suzana’s ears.

  “Come inside,” Jelka says.

  “No. I can’t. I’m on my way home.” Suzana lifts her wrist, looks at her watch without seeing it. “Dinner time. I’ve told you how useless he is in the kitchen.”

  Jelka is dressed in white designer jeans, in a lovely chartreuse boutique shirt. Her hair is done up anew after work. Her makeup is an intricate detailed artwork she might have spent half an hour before a mirror labouring over. Not going anywhere. She’s decided to dress up for the occasion, though the occasion is simply Suzana coming over.

  She makes Suzana think of the flush and thrill of a girl emerging into a woman, of the rush of barely understood allure even in plastic jewellery from the local chemist bought with the pocket money of a few dinars. The whiff of unimagined possibilities in a mother’s abandoned jewellery box, and medicine cabinet perfumes, and ghostly gowns from forgotten balls and dances hanging in wardrobes. All of these things full of the mystery of womanhood that was rich to a growing girl and usually sucked dry within a few years after being offered up to the ceaseless, limitless hunger of men.

  Not for Jelka apparently. The myth took firmer hold in Jelka, until she was a shrunken Cinderella dreaming in eternal sleep on a glass slipper. A confusion of fairytales. Lost at the roots.

  No, it isn’t that simple. Suzana knows that the world of work clothes growing paler every wash, and flat, cheap runners bought from the Frankston Target isn’t a preferable existence. This is a life looking after the seven dwarves as they would have been outside of cartoons. A world of diminished men labouring without end, for no good reason, and a woman’s job thrown in there after them, somehow, somewhere, however she might fit the shoes provided, broken crystal slipper or otherwise. Suzana doesn’t want the face bleached of everything she saw in Jelka’s eyes and yet the Witch’s apple seemed to have different effects on different people. If anything, she wishes she could find some of that eternal sleep.

  “But I want to talk to you,” Jelka says.

  “OK, talk. I’m sorry, but I shouldn’t have stopped. My stomach is starting to eat itself.”

  “I’ll give you something to eat.” Jelka steps back, waving her inside.

  “Please Jelka … Don’t insist. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Am I on a meter?”

  “I just finished work and came straight over. I thought it was an emergency.”

  “Sit down for five minutes. What’s the problem?”

  The problem is that it is a house that also belongs to her husband Ante. And Suzana doesn’t want to step into Ante’s home. He doesn’t want her in his house, though of course he’s never even seen Suzana.

  “Come inside,” says Jelka. The first time, in the year she’s known her, that Jelka has invited Suzana to her house.

  “If you’re not going to start talking, I’m leaving.” Suzana takes a step backwards and begins to turn.

  “What are you doing? I thought we were friends.” Jelka steps out and grabs hold of Suzana’s arm.

  “We are friends. Not schoolgirls.” Suzana shakes the woman’s hand off her arm. Notices a tremble in Jelka’s eyelids. “I’ve got a life that demands my presence,” speaking every word softly, and eventually, it’s an apology.

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about,” says Jelka.

  Suzana can imagine Ante coming home and parking his car in the driveway, stepping out and walking up the cracked concrete path, blocking her exit. Asking her to explain herself. Who she is. Why she’s there. Through the doorway there’s the red and white chequerboard of the Croatian coat of arms. This is the first thing Ante wants you to know when you come to his front door.

  “What do you mean?” Suzana asks.

  “I mean life demanding a presence. Can I demand anyone’s presence? You won’t come in, even for a few minutes. Ante comes home any time he wants, and thinks nothing of practically never seeing me at all. I mean, do you know I haven’t seen my husband for a week?”

  Suzana moves back towards her only friend. “Has he left you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe he left me six months ago. Maybe it was a year ago. I don’t know when.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Won’t you please come in?” The trembling eyelids shut.

  Suzana shakes her head yet moves closer to her, lifts a hand to cup Jelka’s elbow, “What’s happening?”

  Jelka doesn’t open hers eyes. Nods and then says
, “All right, I understand. You need to get home. To your husband.” She opens her eyes and nods, “And this is nothing new. This has been happening for a while. It gets on top of you all of a sudden sometimes. I don’t know how it happened. It just happened. Day by day.”

  She’d begun assuming that there was another woman. Of course she had. The truth disturbs her somehow more than this divorceable offense, and now has her bewildered. What should she do with what she knows? She feels too embarrassed to bring it to their shared family; the people that know them both intimately. Because they would laugh at Jelka. They wouldn’t understand what was disturbing about it at all. What is Ante doing after he finishes a day’s work as an electrician? He travels all the way out to Prahran, where you have to climb three flights of stairs to enter a room filled with quiet men. Silently they walk around green felt covered tables and push around polished sticks, propelling red balls into leather pockets. And this is all it is and no one would understand why it has begun to disturb Jelka as much as it does. She didn’t tell him she’d come to see what he was doing when he said he was going to play snooker. She quietly watched him from a distance playing for hours on end. Day after day, surrounded by other men who talked in murmurs. When Suzana tells her it sounds peaceful, Jelka says, yes, it’s nice. It doesn’t end, though. He goes out after eating his dinner and doesn’t come back until two or three, sometimes later, in the morning. He goes to work and doesn’t call her between jobs. For a year now, and longer still that it had really been going on.

  When Jelka and Ante got married, they’d known each other for a few years. It was as friends of friends, as acquaintances seen at other people’s weddings and parties, and they knew each other a bit better going into marriage, with the promise that they would be going on in that direction. That the general intimacy they’d established would become deeper and more lasting. Perhaps she’d believed in the fairytale of marriage, without knowing it. It seems to her now that they are still friends of friends, and that he is still someone she doesn’t know personally. When she’d met Ante, she knew he was quiet. She’d made the assumption that familiarity would breed an ease in him that would open his muted heart to her, and unfold his bound-up soul. It was as romantic as that. Was she wrong to have made that assumption, she asks Suzana, not expecting an answer. She’s starting to think that the brief glimpses of something more to him than a kind of brooding, brute silence, have been massive efforts on Ante’s part to reveal areas of himself, submerged since childhood, and in future will be as accessible to her as Atlantis. His soul a myth long lost to vague belief, even in himself. And she has tried everything, from attacking him day in, day out, and long silences that numbed her mouth and paralysed her brain, going on for weeks on end, with no success.