by A. S. Patric
Suzana’s whisper across his pillow, “I saw you smile at her Jovan.” Pretending to be asleep.
Tammie doesn’t speak. She takes a hold of the handle in his hands with a firm grip. As though she’s taking a hold of him. Waits for Jovan to respond, a slight swaying through her body. Ready to sink below the water with him again and to feel the weight of his body and the pool of trivial bliss that he will always be surrounded by for her. Holding onto the long wooden handle of the mop. The smooth grain of it, which in this moment, seems to possess the solidity of a tall ironbark reaching up for a blistered-red dreamtime sky swimming with crocodiles. With eyes already closing to slits as she lets herself move into the corner of her brain that generates these fluid, running daydreams. Made by memories and stories she heard when she was a child, swagging out under the hurricane of stars, spinning and opening up to gather the infinite black into a storm of light, with her father, their backs to the ground, listening to his stories at night. Never mentioning God, but God at the centre of everything he told her out there, as though he felt the beginnings of cancer even then, a different kind of storm brewing in a soul only he could believe in. The smooth feel of his axe in the crisp crystalline mornings. The handle almost too heavy to lift. For her father, it was as light as a switch. The axe head red, and shiny sharp blue steel at its cutting edge. Later watching him swing it up high, hanging in the air, using all its heavy momentum to cut down through a fallen Boab. Feeling as small and helpless within the space of Jovan’s breath, swaying above her and massively broad, and wanting him now to lift her up with the same kind of vast power and safe strength planted into the stream of her blood so long ago out in the Kimberley. Wanting Jovan to cut through her until she can spill out with all these rushing incantations and all this vaporising desire.
Jovan pulls the mop out of her hand with an angry jerk. The force of it shudders through her whole body, almost dislocating her shoulder. He dunks the mop head into the water and brings it out and down again at their feet. The dirty, foamy water splashes across her lovely, professional shoes, her stockings, and flecks her charcoal skirt with black and foam. Satin-top French stockings complete with garter belt visible in hints below the tight, hip-hugging skirt. No underwear below the garter belt. He’s seen the outfit once before. Jovan’s never known a woman to wear a garter belt or these kinds of elaborately elegant costumes before. He can’t help feeling the appeal of its ornate seduction, vicious in its gathering power. He might want her in this instant more than he’s ever wanted Suzana. Maybe that’s true. The blood has a way of rushing through the brain, surging with those kinds of lies. He can’t do anything else right now, shove her away when the only other option is to demolish her with desire.
Kitchen staff are beginning to trickle back from their lunch breaks, and she must know how apparent all this would be to them. So she steps closer to Jovan and raises a finger slowly to his mouth, pulls back his cheek, and examines his teeth.
“Looks as though they were rough,” she says, her face pretty with all its perfectly applied make-up.
Jovan is already mopping again as she begins walking away across the now dry, clean kitchen floor. He’s thinking about what she said long after she’s left, and can’t understand what sounds so seductive about those words, Looks as though they were rough. He lets the black water from the mop bucket run down the drain of the kitchen sink.
The change room is busy with people leaving or coming in for their shifts. Voices fill the room with the traffic of conversation. Everyone passes through this room—an intersection with busted lights.
Robert Sewell sits down to put on a fresh shirt as he asks Jovan whether he remembered the clean-up in room 302. Jovan nods. Says, ‘No problem.’ Nods again as Mr X-ray sings a bar of Hey Joe for the first time in weeks. There are two Indian men chatting in their language by a locker, their words interlaced as they seemed to talk almost at the same time, shoulder to shoulder. Offering him no smile today, Jovan walks by bare-chested Bill.
The ‘Greek’, who struts at a standstill, turns on his heel. Picks up a can of deodorant, waving it under his arm as he goes on talking, now into his cream-coloured metal locker, plastered with images of over-exposed pneumatic women screaming in pink, vanilla and blond. With bodybuilders glowing cherry red with high tension tendons and well-oiled muscles.
A newspaper has fallen on the floor and the hospital handyman walks across its pages as he says goodbye. Nobody notices, and from the way he says it, he himself isn’t expecting acknowledgment. Steps over images of a city being bombed from the air, at night time—the explosions are like the flashes of fireworks illuminating the buildings from below.
Bill has been explaining that Australia is full. Bill says that he went to the supermarket last night, and he was surrounded by Indians. A brown invasion. Customers and check-out people. ‘What the fuck is going on, letting so many of these people in?’ Talking out to the two Indians who go on with their interlaced conversation across the room, though speaking ostensibly to Robert Sewell, who is trying to clarify with Bill whether the toilets on the second floor were cleaned as requested, and whether a problematic toilet, prone to blockage, was operational again. Sewell has been asking him all day. Bill’s also directing his thoughts at X-Ray, who is leaning up against a locker not even pretending to listen as he flips through the pages of one of Bill’s pornographic magazines. “Look at these wobble heads,” Jovan hears Bill saying as he passes through. “Why do we need these clowns?”
Jovan is in his own head. He’s taken his boots off. His feet and legs are tired and heavy, so he’s very slow about it. Removing his overalls and then sitting back down on the bench as though to catch his breath. Suzana is spending more of her time scribbling into her notebooks. The only place safe for her in the time since Bosnia, was somewhere buried underground. Coming to the surface isn’t going to be easy. What he can do to assist, or impede, isn’t clear. Perhaps what he should do is look at what she’s been writing. So far he’s operated on an idea of honouring her personal space. If he can make a decision today, it’s that he can’t afford to do that—let this thing run its course when the destination is likely to be underground again. And this time he will be left with a mouth full of dirt and worms.
“Let’s not have any racism here, please,” Sewell says by rote.
“Racism? I’m Greek mate,” Bill says in reply.
“If by that you mean that you’ve been a victim of racism and so …”
“Are you fucking listening to me?” Bill takes a step toward his manager. “I’m trying to say something. Everyone is pretending it’s like this, when it’s like that. Even here, between a group of fucken guys who get shat on by pretty much everyone. We supposed to pretend to enjoy the taste of it as well? That’s what those clowns do. They come over when it’s already fucking hard enough as it is and make enjoying the taste of shit part of cleaning up after the giant arsehole over our heads.”
Jovan goes on thinking about Suzana and the notebooks and the hours of scribbling that was going into them, and wonders what should be done, knowing that there’s nothing he can do. Not about the tossing and turning he feels from her side of the bed, the sweat-drenched nightgowns she leaves hanging in the bathroom most mornings now, or the babble that is beginning to emerge from her mouth as she sleeps, or the unconscious scalp scratching and hair tugging as she writes in those black-skinned books. Nothing he could do about it last time in Belgrade and nothing he can do about it this time either.
Truth is, Jovan always fails Suzana. When she asked whether it’s a good idea to leave Sarajevo, in 1990, and live in Belgrade with Ana and Dejan, and maybe look into the possibility of teaching in London, he laughed. Teaching what? he asked her. Who cares about Yugoslav literature, and what else can he offer anyone? And why would he want to live in London, packed in a concrete box with over six million strangers who will never be anything other than strangers as long as he lives, ants streaming from hundreds of thousands of other concrete b
oxes. So, no to an exit from Bosnia, in 1990, when an exit was still possible.
A few years later, there’s a bathtub with a ring of red. There are towels soaked in blood left lying around. Open doors and windows. A tap in the kitchen still half on. The water running in a quiet, empty apartment, as loud as any alarm he’d ever heard in his life.
In the bathroom. In the bathtub. And there’s nothing he can do in Belgrade to stop it or to get her going again afterwards. She’d done a lot of writing then as well. She stopped after getting out of the hospital and when she says, maybe she and Jovan can go and live in Australia, because she has an uncle living in Melbourne, this time Jovan says yes. Let’s go to the other side of the world. He doesn’t want to fail Suzana again.
Jovan walks into a toilet and swings the door shut behind him as he takes a piss. Thinks these thoughts. All of them thought through, beginning to end, the same way as he had a hundred times before. Millions of times, back in Belgrade, after Suzana opened up her veins as easy as bathtub taps. Saved by her sister, visiting on the off chance Suzana was home. Jovan would have come home a few hours too late, to the corpse of his wife in the bathroom.
When he turns he notices new graffiti on the door. Sprayed red over the other graffiti going on about cocks and cunts. Graffito’s work. Jovan puts his finger to the paint. It’s almost dry. There’s a slight stickiness.
A river of Waste
Just below Your skin
your Bones rot in
history’s flowing Shit
The sharp smell of paint, so this went up a few minutes ago. This is the same door that he saw at the start of his shift. He might have passed Dr Graffito in the change room or hall.
Rushing out into a red steam that has risen from the concrete floor, Jovan shouts, “Who put words on the door of toilet?”
“What the fuck?” Bill turns around from his locker. Shirtless with his singlet in his hand. “Made us jump, mate. Slamming that fucking toilet door.” Bill talks in a customary bellow. Bill spends a lot of time in the gym. The muscles are packed onto his squat Greek frame—seeming to cluster and crowd beneath the skin. “Calm, the fuck, down, Wood Duck.” Starting to grin, Bill shakes his head. “And maybe you should wash your hands after going to the toilet.”
He’s looking for laughs from the other two men as Jovan moves towards him in three quick strides across the room, and has one massive tarantula hand wrapped so far around Bill’s dwarfish throat that his fingers press around the sides towards the spine.
Bill can do no more than half grunt the word fuck in response. Stunned. Unable to reach out his short arms along the long outstretched limb of this sudden Goliath. Bill gurgles.
“This red words on door?” Jovan asks again. All three of the men in the change room are quiet. “You talking about shit. The graffiti words talking about shit. Did you read? Or did you write?”
Robert Sewell lays one hand on Jovan’s shoulder and the other in the small of his back. “Hey,” he says, “Mr Brakochevich, please.” There’s no strength in Sewell’s arms to pull him off. One of the Indian men has come over and he is hauling at Jovan’s shirt so hard it’s beginning to tear, yelling, “Hey! Hey!” as though he doesn’t know any other words.
“This isn’t good,” Sewell says, attempting to do his duty and respond to what is happening in the change room between two of his employees. “Please, Mr Brakochevich.”
None of these men have paint on their hands and all of their faces show surprise or fear. Jovan moving into the room so rapidly. Attacking Bill. Such a drilled movement.
“Hey, stop this. Hey, stop. Stop.” Jovan does not feel or hear the Indian.
Bill’s eyes are swelling. His lips move uselessly and it won’t be long. It’s easy to turn someone off. Jovan can feel the switch just below his fingertips. Is that true? Is it that simple? One way to find out. Do it. Squeeze that fucken dwarf throat. He never need hear another poisonous word from this toxic mind. There would be some silence when the body slumped to the ground and for that moment everything would be perfect.
Jovan releases Bill. Turns to the two other men as if he might attack either one of them next. “He must learn to keep his mouth closed. Or do we learn to walk in his shit?” Jovan says.
Bill has stumbled away towards the toilets, taking air through a throat that must feel half crushed. He shoulder bounces off a wall as he attempts to get away from his assailant. He is disorientated for a second—gets a grip of a basin and gathers his wits. Splashes water onto his face.
X-Ray shakes his head with a smile at the locker room scene and makes a quiet exit. Robert Sewell walks to the toilet to have a look at the new graffiti. When he returns Jovan is putting on a denim jacket and is about to leave for home.
Bill begins swearing at Sewell for employing madmen. Bill punches and throws his shoulder into the lockers as he watches Jovan walk to the sink and wash his hands. Bill swears at Sewell again as he watches Jovan use his special, soft, powder-blue hand towel from his locker. Sewell says he doesn’t hire hospital employees and asks Bill to calm down, explaining that no one wants anymore violence today. He gets shoved away brutally for his troubles as Bill begins to yell abuse at Jovan and to all Serbs. Jovan leaves the room as he entered it. As though everything around him has nothing to do with him, yet the words in the toilet are for Jovan. Of course they are. It’s simple. No surprise in it at all. Dr Graffito knows Jovan in the same way as he knew the optometrist.
He walks to the break room a door down the hall to get something to eat. Suddenly ravenous. Slices of soft white bread in a plastic bag. The television has been left on. There’s no one else in the room. A female presenter is offering up some news about two men attempting to circumnavigate the world in a hot air balloon. They have set an endurance record. In the air for 233 hours and 55 minutes. Their names are Colin Prescot and Andy Elson. Jovan assumes they’re English with those names, but they could be Americans or Australians. He stuffs a second slice of bread into his mouth and looks up at the screen to see the balloon, thinking it can’t be one of those jaunty balloons with vivid stripes of colour seen on advertisements for Kodak film or some such brand. It’d have to be a more impressive balloon, denoting adventure. An expedition, not a joyride. Emphasis on endurance rather than pleasure. Jovan gets a brief glimpse of something silvery and NASA-like, then it’s back to the presenter signing off for the day. A commercial comes on, advertising a television set that will give its prospective owners a new world of experience, entertainment, joy. Jovan walks out of the break room before the ad has finished extolling the virtues of the new technology involved in the product. Jovan calculates it was almost ten days in the air for Prescot and Elson, and wonders whether they got bored with their Everest views and turned on their portable television to a new world of chatter and trivia.
Jovan’s new world began with two suitcases, and Christmas in summer, living in a bungalow at the back of Suzana’s Uncle Mirko’s house in St. Albans, Melbourne, with the novelty of ‘footy’ and cricket on the television, and English in Australian accents. A little over forty hours of flight for Jovan and Suzana. That’s how a world begins, and because it comes with different newspapers and street names and currency, the old world can be packed into a box, and left to gather dust, and be rarely seen. More and more rarely as the years pass. The two worlds drift further and further apart.
Of course, the box doesn’t disappear. It will always be exactly where it always was—in the centre of their lives. It is made of the thinnest sheets of porous material, the most fragile membrane, leaking without warning at any point. The two worlds appear far apart. Sarajevo is across the seas, and as time goes by, the separating waters seem ever broader to Jovan and Suzana, yet the box, which they cannot open, and cannot close, contains their Sarajevo lives. Nothing within it is dead, though they both often think otherwise. They will sit in their Frankston home watching television and don’t notice the Australian accents anymore. They allow themselves to think fondly of Christmas
snow rather than the December heat of Melbourne. Weeks and months pass and the seasons here have a way of offering easier transitions from year to year.
Yet an odour remains, the sickening smell of melting flesh from the heat of a radiator. There are sounds, Suzana’s voice as it murmurs pain in solid thumps. Vanishing a moment later.
The war didn’t start everywhere at the same time in Bosnia. It was part of the civil wars of Yugoslavia, yet where it petered out quickly in other parts of that federation of states, in Bosnia, it grew into something far worse and protracted. It was fought from village to village, town to town, and in cities, street to street and building to building. It was resisted for long periods in some quarters of the state, as it raged full gore in others. It was fought by peasants who had known each other for generations and had often celebrated weddings together, or Yugoslavia’s victories in sport, or mourned the deaths of locals, Muslim or Christian alike. Which should not suggest a paradise of brotherhood. The war, however, was fought by policemen turned generals. By sports stadium hooligans turned sergeants. It was fought by high-school children, trained up to then by PE teachers. In short, it was fought by loose groupings of people organised by no grand plan, leader, or movement.
Muslims vowed to Serbian neighbours that atrocities committed in another town wouldn’t be perpetrated here. Yet they were. Of course, that was also true the other way around. Serbs made promises of decency that they didn’t keep. Promises are part of a currency, and as long as there is an idea of social economy, then these notes can be traded on. A society can become bankrupt through various causes and all parts of the world have witnessed these collapses of a moral economy.
Jovan and Suzana were part of a group of teachers at a university that insisted that their institution should provide a beacon of understanding in the rapidly rising, murderous idiocy all around them. They hadn’t yet seen more than images on television broadcasts, which as horrifying as they can be, are only ever images as one might see in a film. They don’t penetrate and become one’s own. They excite passion, and then fade away. If they had known the difference, they would have packed those same two suitcases, and walked out of Bosnia, into Serbia, or through to somewhere else. They would have taken a bus or train anywhere—wherever it was going.
