Black Rock White City

by A. S. Patric

  She hasn’t been in a public pool since her university days. Was that true? Not since Belgrade? It wasn’t as if there were many pools in Sarajevo. Yes, there were trips to the ocean with Jovan and the children, but a pool takes her back to when she was a student desperately needing to depressurise. And Jovan can barely swim. If dropped into the middle of the ocean he might paddle around for about ten seconds before sinking to the bottom. No, it’s not surprising that it has been such a long time.

  Suzana swims a lazy freestyle to the end of the pool and places her elbows on the edge and rests her chin on her forearms and closes her eyes and thinks about the dream last night. That terrible feeling of lungs being filled with dust was worse than the thought of lungs flooded with water. Water took the edge away. Softened flesh and the mind, especially when hot. Suzana’s legs dangle at the deep end.

  Eyes closed, she becomes aware of the roar of the water through the grates in the side of the pool, of voices echoing in the huge room, calling to each other across water and from opposite ends of the twenty-five metre pool. Mothers shout at their children. Boys laugh and yell and drop into the water, clenching their whole bodies into huge fists, to punch out big splashes. There’s a sign on the wall prohibiting running, jumping and these bombs.

  Suzana opens her eyes. Seconds ago there had been a silent bubble around her head, where she hadn’t noticed a sound. Thinking about Jovan and the children, Belgrade and Sarajevo. Then it pops and the world comes flooding in again.

  A girl of about five has been playing and swimming with an orange swim-ring since Suzana got into the pool fifteen minutes ago. The girl pushes the inflated plastic circle down, over her thin hips, and steps out, back into the water, and sinks straight down.

  A simple failure of logic in a child. Exhaling the air in her small lungs in a single line of bubbles. The only buoyancy left in her little body, gone. Suzana pushes away from the edge of the pool without urgency. She gets a hold of an arm. Not even waving in panic. As though the area on a five-year-old, between shoulder and elbow, is a handle. A perfect fit for Suzana’s hand. She pulls the girl back to the surface and places her on the edge of the pool.

  The girl walks away from her, crying and coughing. Suzana watches her until the girl’s mother isn’t distracted by older sons making trouble at the other end of the pool. The mother doesn’t listen to the girl’s blubbering. She folds the girl in a towel and takes her away to the change room.

  The mother doesn’t thank Suzana. Maybe she didn’t notice. Also possible is that it’s because of the marks on Suzana’s wrists. The way Suzana has them folded on the edge of the pool hides most of the damage. Only the briefest glimpse was necessary.

  The stuck glances, the double blinks, second takes, were common on the beaches of Noosa and Maroochydore. That thought flaring quickly in every set of eyes. Suicide. As if she was death. Failure and loss incarnate. The same primal response to extreme suffering buried in their own minds explaining the moment of horror, however brief.

  Easier, of course, to always wear long-sleeve shirts, no matter the heat of Australian summers. Or the desire to swim free and loose-limbed in a pool of water. Rare for someone like the teenager to register the suicide scars and lean forward into the realisation and suggest pink to match black hair. Compliment breasts and figure.

  The mother comes out of the change room with her girl, dragged along by the wrist, crying again. The mother yells at her two boys, tells them that it’s time they went home. Suzana pushes away from the edge and slides down through the water again.

  Suzana has a mug full of pens and pencils set out on the small round table in her room at the Best Western—a bouquet of cut flowers with all their heads lopped off. Ink in green and red, blue and black. Prettier than a selection of roses, whether in the clichés of red, pink, yellow, white or lavender.

  Suzana hasn’t used pen and paper for her compositions since she was a child. Now she enjoys the tactility of words applied to the page by hand. The way the ink rises on the paper, welts you can feel if you run your fingertips lightly across them. She isn’t in a rush to meet deadlines as she has always been in the past. She orders herself one coffee too many and watches it cool in the cup. Feels it go cold looking at it.

  Back in Belgrade she used a typewriter though other writers she knew had already made the move to computers. She persisted with this habit until Sarajevo. When she started working at the university her typewriter became a memento and she did all her work on a computer, the same as everyone else. She got the most up-to-date computer she could find and there was no going back. Forgot entirely what she’d found so charming about her typewriter. Writing more than ever. All of it was academic and meant nothing at all to her. No, that wasn’t true. Everything she wrote meant a great deal to her mind, sometimes her heart. Never her soul. That was what the fiction was for and she’d written none since that typewriter.

  She smokes cigarettes. It’s been a while. Her taste for tobacco isn’t what it used to be yet the weight of smoke in her lungs is pleasant. She watches her exhalations shift with the morning light until it changes into afternoon light. Blows out her cigarette smoke like she’s evaporating and only her bones remain. She tamps the bottom of another cigarette on a hardcover book from the local library. A history of the Ottoman Empire that told her nothing she didn’t already know. Poorly written to boot. Research is easy. This is what she does so well and it gives her the feeling she’s working. Meanwhile the actual work has not actually moved. There’s no getting away from the feeling that her novel is dying. A death which does not feel as abstract as her ‘soul’.

  Suzana sits at her small round table, paper before her, a pen in her hand. Not writing a word as she looks at the blank void of the paper the whole day. Eventually she finds her retired Janissary again, riding from Istanbul to Belgrade, and follows him into his story as he rides into a deep forest and becomes sick. So ill that he has to find a place to stop and camp while he waits for his fever to pass. Except that the fever doesn’t pass. He gets worse.

  She intends to have him suffering, on the threshold of death for days. There is something about being sick to the point of helplessness in a deep forest that interests her. Somehow she has to work out a way for him to stay alive. Coming back from the brink isn’t easy. So he’ll have to meet someone. Perhaps a witch.

  Suzana has an idea of what real witches may have been in those days. Operating in remote areas as doctors and herbalists some of the time, and as priestesses and visionaries beyond the scope of the prevailing religions. And, yes, they were also needed to summon rivers full of venomous snakes, a black storm of destruction, malformed children, etc. People would pay for spells yet there was never a date on them and life was long enough for some evil to eventually befall the victim of a curse.

  Right now, Suzana is only interested in who her Janissary is. She wants to explore his life through the febrile disordering of his warrior mind and veteran body as he struggles to keep breathing despite lobar pneumonia. The histories of the wars he’s fought for the Ottomans. Was he perhaps involved in the battle for Vienna, in 1683? She might describe the greatest cavalry charge in the history of warfare if she chose that date as her marker. There are other dates with different narrative possibilities.

  For now, she allows her imagination to open to his dreams and visions, as he lies dying among moss-covered stones. In the half-formed mouth of a cave in the side of a hill by a stream, his rifle ready to shoot the forest animals that will come to drink. He has noted the various marks their feet have made by the water. She stops and wonders if she can throw in a little information about how the Janissaries were the first soldiers in history to use rifles as standard weaponry. Also the first to use grenades. She lets that go and writes what the story needs.

  The Janissary has a memory of a well from his childhood in a village he doesn’t know the name of anymore. He is at the bottom of the well. Face tilted all the way back, searching upwards, until his neck hurts so much he is
forced to drop his head. He recalls watching the clouds move above in the circle of blue. The time it takes for one cloud, shaped like a bear, to slide from one edge of the circle above to the other. Another cloud in the shape of a turtle, reminding him of the race his mother told him about. In this one, not only a turtle and hare, there’s a bear to devour them both.

  This last part, from a dream the Janissary is having, remembering and dreaming in fluid transitions of fever. The black bear, no longer the soft white cloud shape, catching the slow turtle and ripping apart his shell, as easily as peeling an orange, and afterwards, catching the hare, sleeping by the side of the road—thinking he has all the time in the world because he’s racing a turtle, and a bear, who’s not much quicker. The bear tears off the hare’s limbs and finds that the white fur comes off too easily, that it’s a costume, within which, a little boy has been hiding.

  The Janissary wakes. Horrified by the dream, yet settling himself quickly. A man used to waking from nightmares of one kind or another. He has opened his eyes. When he focuses, he sees a red deer is drinking from the stream below his stone alcove. His rifle is set on a prop of boulders and a thick branch. He lifts the shoulder stock and takes aim, stops his breath so there’s no movement in his body, doesn’t blink for a few seconds, fires and drops the deer with a bullet to the centre of his chest. Not the head, protected as it is by a nimbus of bone.

  The Janissary is too weak to get up. He closes his eyes again and remembers more details about being forced to stay down at the bottom of a dry well for days. At first, it’s a kind of brutal punishment and it seems as though it might be another of Aesop’s fables. He remembers more. His parents lowering food down on a rope in the well bucket. Their desperate mouths whispering of patience and love. Their voices rain on him, drops of honey as he stands amongst the frogs slapping around his feet. His father’s hoarse voice and his mother’s cold tears.

  The Ottomans discover the boy. Of course they do. It’s impossible to keep a secret like little Mileta Olimpich. The brightest and fittest of that village he was born in, somewhere near the two rivers that cross through the heart of Belgrade. That’s a clearer memory for the Janissary. Fishing with friends, boys bigger than him, one of them is an older brother, at that concourse and wondering where the two great rivers came from and where they are going. The Ottomans take Mileta for their elite corps, the Janissary, as everyone in the village was sure they would. This had been going on for hundreds of years—the blood tax of the devshirme system.

  After six hours of work Suzana has over thirty pages of her handwriting. The second chapter. A working title for the manuscript: Kalimegdan. The four colours of ink interweave across the pages. Black for the story itself. Blue for fragments of narrative in the future of the book. Green for notes. Red for corrections. All of these new pages in Serbian. She will translate them into English for her second draft. The important thing is to be absolutely free first time through the novel. She’s happy to leave it for today, with the Janissary remembering Mileta Olimpich. The name he was given by parents that hid him at the bottom of a well.

  Suzana knows what she will write tomorrow: The Witch finds Murad Selim, shivering and insensible in his stone alcove. The sound of his rifle has caught her attention. She is grateful for the red deer and returns with a cart to haul away the animal carcass. She has little concern for the Janissary and will leave him to die. The deer is not quite dead however, and in a final pulse of life, lifts its head and scratches the Witch across her face with its antlers. Drawing lines of blood. Almost taking out her eye. She hears laughter from the alcove. She walks over to examine the recumbent figure, removing a knife from her robes. Takes the top of his head in a hand, a savage grip of hair, and exposes his neck. She is ready to slaughter him as though he were a sheep. He says, Hvala. Eyes open. Eyes close.

  The Witch is still bleeding. She sits back to wipe her face. Glances back at the red deer and then the half-dead man. She will drag the Janissary back to her cottage on her cart and coax him back to life. When she asks him for his name, the Janissary will say he doesn’t know. Suzana is not sure which name she will use for her Janissary. Perhaps Murad to begin with, and later she will call him Mileta, as he takes part in the First Serbian Uprising in 1804. Suzana is set on the new date as she puts her notebooks into a leather folder and zips it shut. She gathers her many pens and places them back into the mug in the middle of the round table.

  She picks up the phone and orders food from a local café that delivers. Not another coffee because her hands are already shaking. Her eyes go out of focus and everything she sees is a blur. It might have been as long as a day since she ate a proper meal. She’s not sure. It’s morning now. The night has passed. Suzana loses herself in the haze of her starved body and her exhausted brain. All she can do is wait by her motel room door for someone to bring her something to eat.

  There’s music behind the door. She notices it when she steps inside the house. She doesn’t move. For an instant she thinks perhaps he’s tricked her, deliberately not parking the panel van in the front, so she’d walk inside thinking he was not home. If Jovan walks down the hall she will turn and leave. For good this time. She stands by the open front door, waiting for him. Listening to classical piano with a bewildered expression on her face. She calls out his name. Jovan doesn’t answer.

  A radio announcer tells her the song was by Debussy, and that a previous piece was by Ravel. He begins to talk about Impressionism. She follows his voice to the lounge, perplexed because they don’t own a radio and music has never played in their Reservoir Road home.

  In the lounge there’s a new stereo system where the television had been before Jovan picked it up and threw it into the backyard. Her notebooks and folders are stacked on the coffee table in a neat pile. She wonders if Jovan has been reading her novel.

  The announcer signs off for the morning and a brief piece of music signals a transition to the midday news. Various details are rattled off about world events, Y2K preparations dominant. 400 billion US dollars will be spent globally by governments and companies before the end of the year for something as simple as clocks ticking over from 1999 to 2000. Following with the state of the stock markets of Europe, America and Australia, the sports and the weather. Twenty-six degrees today. Fine and clear. A perfect Melbourne day in autumn.

  Suzana sits on the couch. She’s wondering if Jovan has made any notes while reading her manuscript. Giving each other feedback on their writing was as common as a conversation about how the children behaved with a new babysitter or a bit of annoying university gossip. Jovan’s comments on her work were often brilliant. A difficult essay, that wasn’t going anywhere, might come alive with a particular insight, and she would race it all the way to the finish line.

  Suzana pages through her notebooks. She’s disappointed to see no hint of marginalia, no phrases underlined, no scratch of ink to indicate that he had indeed read what she’d written. The first chapter was in English, so perhaps it wasn’t as easy for Jovan. Or more likely, it was this separation. How could he possibly comment on her novel when she’d walked out of the house one evening? Without leaving as much as a note. And then an unbroken silence for a week.

  That time of words and sentences, of ideas and philosophies, inspiration and passion, driving each other forward and upwards, to be better and clearer, more eloquent, more alive, more beautiful—had felt for a moment connected to her. Slumping back into the sag of the couch, there’s the cold, divorced reality between her and that past. No, of course, he had not read these drafts and notes. That’d be as difficult to imagine as coming home to find new pages of Jovan’s poetry.

  A news segment follows the general update on the radio.

  “The noise starts around half an hour before the bombs fall as the animals in Belgrade zoo pick up the sound of approaching planes and missiles, director Vuk Bojovich said.” The reporter shifts from the intro directly to a pre-recorded interview, a segue to a heavy Balkan accent, ‘It’s on
e of the strangest and most disturbing concerts you can hear anywhere. It builds up in intensity as the planes approach—only they can hear them, we can’t—and when the bombs start falling it’s like a choir of the insane. Peacocks screaming, wolves howling, chimpanzees rattling their cages.’”

  The radio reporter says that the zoo has been particularly hard hit by NATO’s air strikes campaign aimed at forcing Belgrade to accept an autonomy deal for Kosovo, particularly when the alliance attacked Belgrade’s power system and water supply.

  “‘I had 1,000 eggs of rare and endangered species incubating, some of them ready to hatch in a couple of days. They were all ruined. That’s 1,000 lives lost.’ Meat in the zoo’s freezer defrosted and has gone off, making it suitable only to scavengers like hyenas and vultures. Belgrade people donated meat out of their home freezers when the power went down, but most of that wasn’t even fit for animals. The lack of water has meant that some animals, particularly the hippos, are literally swimming in their own excrement.

  “‘We had to give dirty drinking water to a lot of delicate animals. We won’t know the effects of that for two or three months,’ Bojovich said.

  “While the zoo overlooks the confluence of two major rivers, the Danube and the Sava, both are heavily polluted by chemical and industrial waste. The nightly air strikes, with their accompaniment of anti-aircraft fire lighting up the sky, has had other, possibly longer-lasting effects on many of the animals, the director said. Many of them have aborted their young in the latter stages of pregnancy. Birds have abandoned their nests, leaving eggs to grow cold. Even a snake aborted some forty foetuses, apparently reacting to the heavy vibration shaking the ground as missiles hit targets nearby. The worst night the zoo can remember was when NATO hit an army headquarters 600 metres away with a huge detonation.