Fox

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  On my return, I passed through my “neighborhood” and shopped for supplies. At the fabric shop I found reasonably good quality cotton bedding and white linen fabric by the yard for the curtains. I bought sewing supplies and scissors because I wasn’t sure I’d seen any at the house. I spotted a smile on the face of the cashier and realized I’d been grinning the whole time, completely unawares. On the way to my car I passed by the Zdravko café. The same kids were sitting there, exactly as before, as if they hadn’t budged since I saw them last time.

  “Hey, Auntie, moving in?” jibed Jaunty.

  “Do you mind?” I asked, halting for a moment.

  “Not me. But everyone else’s clearing out . . .”

  “So?”

  “Nobody normal moves here.”

  “So?”

  “You look normal!” said Jaunty, and the boys around him met his quip with hoots of support.

  “So why don’t you leave?”

  “Because I’m not normal. And I don’t have the cash for a bus ticket!”

  The boys giggled, and several approved his comment with “high-five” gestures.

  I turned to go to the car.

  “So, buy me a ticket, Auntie!” warbled Jaunty, laughing, behind me.

  “A ticket, a ticket!” chanted the other boys in unison.

  “A ticket to America . . .” someone sang out solo.

  In this amateur-production provincial tragedy, I thought, these kids are like a chorus that has no clue it’s the chorus, or what the function of a chorus is.

  Yet that lone voice, singing out among the others with a line from a golden oldie Yugo tune from thirty years ago (. . . buy me a pretty dress, silver jewelry, red raspberries, and a ticket to America) touched me. Just the giftie for Auntie, I thought.

  16.

  Who knows, so maybe all the way to the house I dragged the silly metaphor of the amateur theater group along like a mental burr, because after dinner when Bojan and I were out on the porch, I didn’t feel as if I were “sitting in life” (“I sit here in life as if I’m sitting in a movie theater,” said a friend of mine once) but on a stage, before an empty auditorium, and somebody had switched off the sound and lights and every way of communicating with the world.

  “I believe I have a problem,” I said.

  “What sort?”

  “With communicating.”

  “Go on . . .”

  “My little niece never answers my emails with the answer I expect.”

  “No?”

  “Instead she covers the screen with smiley faces and pulsing hearts. It’s no better when we talk on the phone. She never, for example, answers the usual questions of ‘how are you?’ and ‘what are you up to?’ Instead she breathes sounds into the phone like, chchchchchch, zhzhzhzhzh, or shshshshsh. Or she puffs air, pooooh, pooooh, she laughs, she whistles . . .”

  “The child isn’t used to conventional language.”

  “True. Now she’s in the phase of juggling emoticons. When she has no computer handy, she draws them freehand. She draws little grumpy faces when she’s angry, or silly-looking blobs gushing tears when she’s sad. She feels that conventional language is not hers, and never will be. That is the language of schoolbooks, the language of the Battle of Gory, poetic odes to kin and nation, the language with which grown-up men send their messages. She’s already sensing the male violence in this language and her exclusion from it.”

  Bojan got up and went into the living room. He came back a minute later with a book and a flashlight. He switched on the flashlight and read . . .

  “The poet is a cloud that slays with thunder, pelts with hail, soaks the furrows, and swells the rivers with its blessed deluge or merely flashes on the solemn skyline, vanishing after the blazing sun or the stars, chill and drowsy, like a sigh. The Croatian pasturelands would perforce have seared bone-dry with nary a cloud . . . What makes you think that I’ve suffered any less from the male language of violence, this canonized literary pornography? Just because I’m a man?”

  “Whose lines are those?” I asked. I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t recognize the poet.

  “That you ought to know. A Croatian classic.”

  “Rings, rattles, chimes, sounds, throbs, thunders, booms, resounds . . . This is the language of my breed . . . That one?”

  “Ha! No, but no matter . . . What I meant to say is that I, too, am a victim, just like your niece. The study of law was harsh training for adapting to a language that is every bit as much a departure from ordinary speech as was this ‘poetic baroque’ of a moment ago. I earned my degree in ‘bureaucratic baroque.’ We are all victims of somebody’s hot air . . . In that sense literature shares ground with politics.”

  He was right, but I didn’t respond. The sky was studded, again tonight, with stars. When I gazed up at them my head spun with a mild giddiness.

  “This morning I sat in my car, fully intending to flee to Zagreb,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Scared?”

  “I have no reason to be. You’re a good man.”

  “Is that a question or an assertion?”

  “A question.”

  “I’m not a good man. I have no stamina. But being bad requires stamina. And I’m tired.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of us, us men, who are forever stamping our feet in our Croatian or Serbian haka, like the Maoris of New Zealand. They shout, wag tongues, flex muscles, glower, roll eyes, roar, howl, terrify the enemy. This has been going on and on and shows no sign of stopping.”

  “And what else?”

  “Of my environs, of the unrelenting crass, witless behavior. Vulgarity and idiocy—a deadly cocktail. Our people are not kind, they’d rather die than say a kind word. We’re a peasant culture, people here are convinced there’s no courtesy that is not masking some measure of blackmail or deceit.”

  “And what else?”

  “The doltish repetition. Everyday life here is an exhausting re-run of the fable of the fox and the stork. Why doesn’t the fox relent and serve the stork the cooked frog in a narrow-necked glass? Why doesn’t the stork relent and serve the fox the chicken wing on a flat plate? Why doesn’t the fox stroke the stork’s long bill with its tail, why doesn’t the stork comb the fox’s fur with its bill? Why never?”

  “And what else?”

  “Backwoods country music that’s more a caterwaul than a tune.”

  “Ha, ha . . .”

  “I knew you’d like that one.”

  “And what else?”

  “Conversations like this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is women’s talk.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Police interrogation.”

  “Unfair!”

  “But true. You ask me one thing, but what you’re really hoping for is something else.”

  “I want to know what you’d say if I said I like you.”

  “So soon?”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not very original. All women are crazy about de-miners.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you never know whether or not they’ll be coming home! Heh, heh . . .”

  17.

  Once when I woke at night in my Amsterdam apartment and went to the kitchen for a glass of water, I noticed a barely audible, strangely resonant and penetrating sound, much like the ping made by a crystal glass. This weird, thin ping zinged through the air and vanished, and, though it wasn’t grating, it left me with a vague angst. I couldn’t explain where it was from or pinpoint its cause; it dropped from somewhere like a spider spinning down its thread—and vanished. Maybe somebody somewhere in outer space had struck a tuning fork and the tone escaped and buzzed through my apartment like a crystalline fly. What starts a fissure cracking like that and when does it begin? When does the internal erosion, the crumbling, the sliding begin, when does the fall, in fact, start? Does it announce itself as a barely audible crysta
l ping in the silence of night, or as one of those pits that suddenly opens and yawns before us?

  Rummaging through Bojan’s modest collection of videocassettes, I found the old movie Falling Down by director Joel Schumacher. I had cut the lengths for the linen curtains I’d bought at the local shop and now I needed to hem them. I knew the job would take time, so I thought that with the movie, which I’d watched once years before, the chore of hemming would go more easily.

  Bill (“D-Fens”!) Foster, a man wearing a perfectly ironed white short-sleeved short and a tie, “snaps” just as he’s driving home in his car and gets stuck in traffic jammed by roadwork. It’s a hot day, the air-conditioning in his car is on the fritz, a tiresome fly begins buzzing around, and the infuriated man tries to swat it out of the car. His range of vision dissolves into fragments as if following his internal downward slide. We, the onlookers, along with Foster, catch close-ups of aggressive human lips through car windows, scowling grimaces, ads with pointless messages to which we infer fateful weight, painful scenes of the socially disenfranchised (the homeless, beggars, lone demonstrators). This vortex of quick, sharp, short frames from everyday Los Angeles coincides with Foster’s internal meltdown. He wants to make it to his daughter’s birthday party as quickly as possible and now the roadwork is blocking his way. Incensed, he ditches his car and takes off on foot, and when asked by one of the drivers “Where do you think you’re going?,” he answers, simply, “Home.” The whole morass of circumstances and the many people and things he meets on his way—from the out-of-order phone booth to salespeople who won’t give him change for a pay phone, to a group of young gangsters out for a bruising, to dimwitted waitresses, to the owner of an army-navy surplus store—maniacal Nick the neo-Nazi—to Foster’s ex-wife who, when he finally reaches her by phone, denies him access and threatens him with the police, to a police inspector who spends his last day before retirement handling his last case by obstructing Foster in his determination to go home. Foster, who doggedly defends his human dignity and minimal human rights, is finally cornered and, instead of turning himself in, settles for suicide by cop. He allows the policeman to kill him so his life insurance policy will go to his daughter. Finally a way to “go home” and give his daughter her birthday present.

  It occurred to me that this film is a perfect analysis of the mechanism for how a person falls, and at the same time it’s a youthful, cinematic, American twin to Krleža’s novel On the Edge of Reason. True, Krleža’s time frame may be different, as are his place, culture, and medium. The mechanics of the fall of Krleža’s hero begin when, at dinner around a table where he’s sitting with several other guests, he qualifies the actions of his host as “criminal, bloody, and morally diseased,” which the actions truly are; the others around the table either disagree or haven’t the courage to voice their agreement.

  Foster is fighting almost pitifully for his fundamental freedoms: the right to speech, accountability, rationality, the freedom of choice, the right to disagree, but in the end he’s beaten by the incremental chain-reaction of absurdities. It’s as if the director is trying to convince us all the while that the problem lies with Foster and his frayed nerves, his failings (like losing his job), and not with what surrounds him. The surroundings behave as they always do, but instead of conforming, miming, acquiescing, evading conflict, Foster obstinately defends his right to his own opinion, to his humanity, to “normalcy.” In the end, he wonders how all this could have happened, the fall, after he’d done everything he’d been told to do his whole life.

  The fall begins when there’s no way back. (I’ve passed the point of no return, says Bill), a fall is gravity-bound, it begins when, for some reason (the trigger being, ultimately, moot), we drop out of the mainstream, step away from the crowd (that disgorges us like an irritating crumb), and venture forward as a loner. Regarding the different trajectories and velocities between us and the “rest of the world,” we feel increasingly that they are wrong, while they think we’re out of line. They see us as having broken the rules, we have no steady footing in the gravitational dynamic, we’re not adapted, yet meanwhile we feel we’re defending our fundamental human rights. When Nick, the crazed owner of the army-navy surplus store, tries to handcuff Foster in a violent move that threatens to escalate into sexual violence (against Foster), Foster says: “I can’t.” “Why?” asks Nick. “I’d fall,” replies Foster calmly before he stabs Nick in self-defense.

  The curtains were hemmed. I’d spent several hours stitching them by hand, but it was worth it. The whiteness of the linen gave the whole room an astonishing freshness. I’ve always known that well-chosen curtains do wonders on windows. And then, for some reason, I slipped the videocassette behind the other cassettes on the bottom shelf, exactly as if, by watching the movie, I was up to something I shouldn’t have been doing and was covering my tracks.

  Bojan noticed the curtains from the doorway as he entered the house.

  “Now we know: spring has sprung,” he said brightly.

  He’d brought with him two pots with two little round cacti.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “The wife of one my colleagues sent them.”

  He carefully placed the pots with the cacti on the windowsill. Their spines touched.

  “There,” he said. “Even cacti like to cuddle, see?”

  This was an odd statement. It was marked by a zest unusual for his age.

  18.

  “What came before . . .?” I asked as we sat on the porch, sipping wine.

  “Before what?”

  “Before Kuruzovac?”

  “Before Kuruzovac was . . . Kuruzovac,” he said, and added, “And after Kuruzovac, Kuruzovac!”

  “You don’t need to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said, feeling a stab of rancor, more at myself for having been caught out in my attempt to learn something that was, perhaps, none of my business.

  In a generous concession, he talked. Grown-ups generally establish mutual trust by offering information about themselves: first and last name, address, married, unmarried, offspring . . . True, we were both part of the pre-internet, pre-Facebook, pre-selfie, pre-digital generation that was unaccustomed to having such things placed on display. He came half-way and swept away my uneasy feeling that I had intruded on his privacy.

  He was an only child, son of a respected professor of economics, an excellent student, he graduated in record time, found a job, qualified as a judge and was confirmed, bought an apartment. In contrast to his peers he did all this without breaking a sweat. He traveled, enjoyed himself . . . And then he met her, Vesna, a doctor a few years younger, they married and had a little girl, Dora . . . The whirlwind years all swirled into a single tangled morass in 1991: the collapse of Yugoslavia, the political upheaval, the death of his mother, the new Croatia, the war, Dora’s birth . . . When one spins a globe in search of the place where this all happened it’s barely visible, all of Yugoslavia is no bigger than a Kuruzovac—and Croatia is a third of a Kuruzovac. Seen from that vantage point, all of our storms were teapot tempests, but proportions notwithstanding they felt like tempests to us. When he looked back at that now with the distance afforded by almost a quarter of a century (Heavens, had that much time really passed?) those were the years of the greatest risk and stress. Earlier we’d thought of our world as stable and then it began, suddenly, to crumble, an earthquake-like experience, people felt the ground shifting beneath their feet, the slideshow began and our world became intolerably transparent, we were suddenly seeing everything as if under a magnifying glass, every grimace, every facial twitch, every wrinkle, every lie flitting like a shadow across peoples’ faces. This was a time when masks truly did fall away, no matter how pathetic that might sound, and naked human fear bubbled up to the surface. Encounters with human fear were something he’d gladly have avoided; this was one of the most disturbing experiences he’d had. No, he couldn’t say he, himself, was afraid, he was far too shocked by the fear of the people arou
nd him to have the time for any fear himself, he could not for the life of him understand where this terror sprang from or what made people, with no visible external prompting, transform into a quaking, panting, sniveling, horrified collective. In our childhood we were nourished on fairy tales about valor, human dignity, sacrifice, the brave partisans and dastardly enemy, about honesty, sincerity, brotherhood and unity, heroism. All these tales drew on the same repertoire of morals, whether socialist or religious. And by the way, the two were not as antithetical as people liked now to think. Naked human fear was perhaps his greatest revelation, it showed us all as having a low tolerance, we’re like mice that run even from a wind-up cat. And everything else was about the law of gravity. Those who joined the stampede were spared, those who flailed to keep from falling were trounced. Heroes were always trounced in the end. The mob dictated the criteria and standards, at the first available opportunity it recast its fear as courage, its transgressions as heroism, and so on . . . Vesna had healthy instincts. Her vitality quotient far outstripped his. She was on this earth to flourish and he to flounder. They were cut from different cloth. Phrases began cropping up in what she said, such as: catch the last train out, or better safe than sorry, or when in Rome, do as the Romans, or money doesn’t stink, or it’s our turn now, and he felt certain she’d taken them in some time ago at an almost visceral level, but had held off using them till now. Everything she said sounded crass and vulgar to him, though he knew the mistake was only his. She was simply destined to survive. While the whole wartime and post-war situation appalled him, she seemed, or so he thought at the time, to find it thrilling. While all “normal” people like Vesna fought to keep their heads above water, he cogitated on the vulgarity of surviving. All in all, the exigencies of daily life in Croatia badly eroded their relationship. She thought he really ought to adapt, what a ninny, he should get his shit together, get his ass in gear; maybe they’d be better off going abroad for Dora’s sake if not for his, Vesna would have no trouble adapting—everybody needs anesthesiologists, but he’d have a rockier time of it, he had to face that, it would be tough to find work in the law and he had no other talents or skills, because he couldn’t so much as change a lightbulb. Maybe it was high time for him to face the music, put his nose to the grindstone and stop asking for trouble (what was the point of asking for trouble?), and besides, if he’d only open his eyes he’d see amazing opportunities all around him, things that only came up once in a million years, it was a time to be spry, no point waiting till the fat lady sings. Hadn’t he noticed yet the people around him, his acquaintances and friends, swarming up the social ladder like cockroaches, so why didn’t he also move up a rung or two, he should be on his toes! And then in a flash the pace accelerated and he could no longer slow or channel it in any way . . . He lost his job, she accused him more viciously of incompetence, inertia, inadequacy, and then there was the “incident”: he had a small traffic accident when Vesna and Dora were in the car. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, or Vesna’s. Dora wasn’t harmed, but Vesna’s collar bone was fractured, and while she was still in the hospital she demanded an expedited divorce. He sold the apartment, gave her all the proceeds from the sale, and she already had two airplane tickets to Sweden for herself and Dora where a job was waiting for her at a hospital. Since then she hadn’t been in touch for . . . how long? She never looked back at the maniac who’d been so out of it that he’d jeopardized two lives, hers and her daughter’s. Even after she left he still couldn’t digest what had happened. He moved in with his father. His father asked to be placed in an old people’s home, where he soon died.