Fox

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  It was difficult finding a job in his field; Croatia had fewer inhabitants than the city of Berlin, and word soon got around that he was not flexible. And he himself no longer wanted to have anything to do with the dirty dealings that were getting grimier by the day. He did not mean to suggest he was such a moral paragon, he felt inflexibility and inadequacy were his systemic errors, there was no way he could change; he was past the point of no return. True, “inadequate” people stubbornly believe they’re to blame for everything. If they’d only made that extra little bit of effort, rolled up their sleeves, if they’d really applied themselves, if they’d been more flexible, if they’d done this or that, if they’d tried, truly tried, everything would have turned out differently. But everything would have been the same. And when he realized this he decided to leave Zagreb and work in de-mining. He rented out the Zagreb apartment he’d inherited from his dad. The rent he earned, though it wasn’t much, he sent to Dora, to an account somewhere abroad. He was saving the apartment for her if she should come back to Zagreb one day. His friend (and my lawyer!) proposed that he stay in the village house that nobody had used for years. He squatted there with the lawyer’s blessing. He needed very little. The only painful issue was Dora. He longed to see her. Sometimes she’d contact him with a brief message just to let him know she was alive. She was writing her dissertation at Goldsmiths University in London, that was the last news he’d had from her, more than a year before. He knew nothing about Vesna, just that she was prospering. People like Vesna who run on instinct are invaluable, everything pays off for them. By now he was deeply grateful to her that she’d intervened so speedily and efficiently to jettison a life that was going nowhere fast and save Dora. Maybe Dora would understand it all one day. In time he sorted things out in his own mind, but by then the situation was beyond repair. He knew time had left him in the dust, but, to his surprise, nothing hurt. The world was a chaotic place, we usually came to this once we’d finally exhausted all our energy persuading ourselves that we were living in the best of all worlds. And the time we lived could barely be called time, it was sticky, tasteless, insipid, amoral, a barely digestible porridge . . . There, in that sense, there wasn’t much difference between him and those two Bosnians I described to him the other day. He, too, had veered off the tracks . . .

  “I assume you’re not going to apologize for that?”

  “No. And besides, I’m not somebody people can rely on. I’m destined for the dump, not for evolution. Who knows how these global things are added and subtracted. But remember the harmless fact that millions of people the world over have stopped smoking over the last twenty years. Millions no longer inhale and exhale, and bluish clouds of cigarette smoke have ceased to be a part of our landscape. Millions have stopped using sugar and now the little sugar packets are so extraneous that they serve as mini-posters bearing the verses of forgotten poets. Millions have begun exercising, which they didn’t do before, but now they do in order to keep up in the race: new technology is on the rise, life is accelerating, and there’s an obsession with longevity. The first thing we should be thinking about is evolution.”

  “Oof, big words.”

  “Only now have I started to like life and what it’s become. I’m doing something useful, much more useful than if I’d stayed in the judiciary. I’m learning useful things: how to garden, plant lettuce, pick mushrooms, how to make apricot jam and gooseberry preserves, how to change a light bulb . . . All in all, every day I work on my adequacy,” he said with a note of irony.

  “Why do I suddenly have the sense that the two of us are conversing like characters in Voltaire’s Candide,” I commented.

  “Good point, the only thing left for us is to tend our garden,” he answered.

  We clinked our glasses to that and sipped the wine.

  19.

  As metaphors for lives, literary genres have been worn to tatters by overuse, but people never tire of describing human lives as epics, dramas, tragedies, farces, thrillers, untold stories, Broadway shows, and heartthrob romances. They still delight in comparing their life to a novel (Oh, if you knew the story of my life, what a cliff-hanger!), a play, a tale. True, we’re surrounded by movie, television, and computer screens, so people live their lives by following a scenario, or sit in the director’s chair of their lives. The newest selection of “life metaphors” is aligned with digital technology (It was my avatar, not me! His life has been reduced to a tweet.), and the digital may, one day, outstrip the literary.

  The oldest “metaphors for life” are maritime, so we experience shipwrecks, and perfect storms that cast us up on foreign shores. People take the rudder and get underway and it’s plain sailing; living life means steering between lust and sin, we batten down the hatches, know the ropes, we hold our own between the Devil and the deep blue sea. The perfect storms of life are retribution for our sins, the riptides and choppy waters are our life experiences, and the beacon on the stormy map of life symbolizes our faith in God.

  It occurred to me that all these trite metaphors work as shorthand, much like today’s text messages or tweets. In our story, Bojan’s and mine, the metaphors snapped shut too quickly and easily, like handcuffs clapped onto the wrists of amateur thieves. Everything, our story, and I myself, was on the verge of soap opera, and even Bojan’s death, no matter how real and terrible, was also on the very verge . . .

  Bojan went off into the woods to the right of the road, the safe side that was not a mine suspicious area. He stepped on an anti-personnel bounding spray mine, a Prom that a Serbian soldier or paramilitary fighter must have put there without telling anybody. It was his little joke, his tease, a pile of shit left out by somebody’s door, a Parthian shot, a real farewell gift for Auntie, bye bye, take care, no hard feelings, ta-ta and screw you, fuck all your goddamn mothers, one-two-three whoopeeeee, a little something to remember me by, ashes-ashes-we-all-fall-down, a sweet little secret to warm him, the anonymous fool, over the boring days to come, which might suddenly jolt him awake one night, leave him giggling, pleased as Punch; and who knows, maybe from the momentary surge of victory he’d pounce on the woman sleeping next to him and then fall asleep with the image of the enemy who’d be blown to bits like a clay pigeon . . . What was Bojan doing off in the woods to the right of the road? Nobody could tell me that, he probably simply went for a stroll to breathe the forest air without the constant smell of danger that permeated the area to the left side of the road.

  Everything after that happened quickly, and as if in a fog. The crew published an obituary for Bojan in the papers, hoping that people he knew might see it and come forward. There were probably email addresses on his computer of the people he’d been in contact with, but they couldn’t access the laptop without his password. Some of the crew made the effort, drove to Zagreb, sought the help of a computer service, but to no avail. Nobody knew Bojan’s wife’s surname, she might have remarried in the meanwhile or maybe was using her maiden name. Or maybe she was no longer in Sweden. Nor had he left any information about his daughter, Dora, probably because he knew nothing of her whereabouts. His crew knew he sent her money to an account abroad. The lawyer I’d called, hoping he might know something more, knew only that.

  The crew had a fund to cover funeral expenses. They buried Bojan in the woods, near the place he was killed, trodding a path from the dirt road to the grave. They arranged for a permit to bury him in the woods; Bojan would be tickled pink, they said. We have another grave on the left side, in the work area, they said, and they took me to it to show me. They liked it that I followed them with no fear. The President of Croatia was here last year, they said, and, by God, he didn’t dare . . .

  The Terminator, the eldest of the de-miners, gave a thoughtful, frank, heartfelt graveside eulogy, in defiance of all expectations. The crew bought a wreath with the slightly awkward words rest in peace your de-miners on it, and one of them, the youngest, tossed a children’s toy plastic egg into the grave. In the egg they’d put a pull ring from a
hand grenade; he showed it to me before he slipped it back into the egg and tossed it in. This was his amulet, he always had it with him in the pocket of his flak jacket. “Off it goes with Bojan to help him, heaven bound, pay his tolls. Who knows, it may come in handy,” he said, tipping back his chin and gazing skyward.

  The crew was kind. They offered to lend a hand, on principle, they treating me like Bojan’s widow. I kindly declined. They asked for my address, which I did not decline, so they could send me a photograph of the gravestone when it was made, it would be a small stone, they said, much like the one I saw on the left side, but instead of the normal rectangular shape they would order an oval stone, partly because Bojan was not religious, and party because the oval wouldn’t disturb the woods, it would fit unobtrusively into the landscape. They hoped I didn’t mind.

  While we were talking they watched me with reserve. Although they were gracious, I knew most of them believed I’d brought Bojan bad luck.

  20.

  I shoved a plug-in electric burner under the old seaweed-stuffed sofa and switched it on. The dry seaweed would catch fire sooner or later, I knew, and then all the rest would go up in a blaze. I carefully shut all the windows tight. And, look, through the window facing the orchard I caught sight of an enchanting scene. There was a light breeze. Petals wafted down from the fruit trees and drifting through the air like snowflakes. The red-haired fox was bounding around the garden like a coiled spring. Breathless, I gazed out at the scene. And then, as if it had noticed me, the fox swiftly slunk through the grass into the woods.

  I took the two cacti, locked the house, and tossed the key in a ditch. Off I set for Zagreb, driving along a back road, but some ten miles later I pulled over onto a side road and stopped the car by a clover field. There was no shelter nearby, but there was also nobody about. I crouched behind the car and urinated. As I straightened up I felt my knees buckle, and a sudden, overwhelming drowsiness pulled me down. Instead of lying on the car seat I stretched out in the clover field. The ground, all day in the sun, was warm.

  Images from my early childhood floated to the surface of my memory: days of big plans and little wonders. Behind the modest workers housing where we lived were gardens where the residents, including my parents, had planted fruit trees and grown vegetables. As little girls we decorated our ears with cherries, sour cherries were our lipstick, and the red and pink petals were our fingernail polish. We glued the petals to our nails with our spit. We pored over the cuts we’d gotten from scraping our knees (our knees, always our knees!) as if they were magnificent craters. The little wonders—the potato beetle that laid its tiny orange eggs on the inner side of the potato plant leaf; the bluish vein gliding under the transparent skin on a child’s temple; the caterpillar winding itself around a finger like a living ring; the snail leaving an opalescent trail; the heavy, fragrant peony blossom opening like a book; the golden hairs on a child’s arm lit by sunlight and an ant seeking a way through the golden foliage—stirred in us a thrill that left us breathless. The world of my childhood spun from within my eyes in intoxicating, crystaline close-ups.

  When I started awake from my slumber, it seemed as if a whole eternity had passed. My watch showed I’d slept barely fifteen minutes. In Kuruzovac—I now felt—I’d spent a goodly portion of my life, yet I’d been there barely three weeks. I’d spent yet another illusion, I thought, just as fast as I’d bought it.

  I got up, a little groggy from the brief, deep sleep, brushed the dirt off my clothes, and plucked a clover flower that I draped over the rear-view mirror. Turning back to the car, I raised my middle finger and with it bid goodbye to my village. I thought back to my clueless chorus, the kids at the local café. To them, too, the finger. I closed my eyes for a moment. A magnificent sight blazed in my mind’s eye. Against the lavish background of the setting sun erupted a powerful floral explosion. Millions of lilac florets, floral shrapnel, shot through the air, and the intense smell of the lilacs mingled with the smell of the conflagration. Wow, look, Auntie lit a sparkler!

  I pulled out onto the main road. Beside me passed green fields dimming slowly with the day. My thoughts flew and my little niece’s favorite counting song clung to me like a burr: . . . A mousie went a-nibbling, poor little mousie, what can I do; came a cat with its kittens, ate that mouse with all its pups; came a fox with its kits, ate that cat with all its kittens; came a wolf with its whelps, ate that fox with all its kits, came a bear with its cubs, ate that wolf with all its whelps . . . The world is a minefield and that’s the only home there is. I must accustom myself to this fact, I thought, and made my way slowly to Zagreb.

  PART FOUR

  The Theocritus Adventure

  He turned to Behemoth and said, “Come on, Behemoth, let’s have the novel.”

  —M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

  1.

  Teeth as Fine as Grains of Rice

  Shocks of her hair are dyed in shades the color of honey, with one lavender streak. Using a gesture repeated oh so often she tosses her hair to the side. Always the same side. She toys with her hair the way young women do, because they love imitating each other: she scoops it up using her fingers like a hair clip at the nape of her neck and then lets it go. The gesture is coy, almost a porno tic. She’s nearly forty but she looks younger. She watches me with an unabashed gaze positioned so that our eyes aim in different directions: her gaze moves from down to up. Her eyes don’t yield much, she’s the one controlling the field of vision, the world doesn’t enter her, she enters the world.

  As far as she’s concerned, she knows that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be achieved without promotional strategies. She milks every option she has. She posts on Facebook, she tweets, she blogs. She figured all this out when her first book came out, which, so far, is her only book, though not for long. She gives the name of her town as “the great backward beyond.” And then she adds: “That depends, of course, on which way you’re facing.” She laughs, flashes her teeth—fine as grains of rice. No, she says, she thinks she’s no genius but she does believe she’s a good writer. And besides, don’t forget how writer-geniuses die in semi-anonymity. Especially “our” geniuses, who come from “our” little backwater, even the Nobel Prize doesn’t help, take Ivo Andrić, she says. Who has even heard of him any more?! So I ask her why she thinks “our” geniuses merit attention, instead of, say, the geniuses of Belgium or Romania? She doesn’t understand my question. And why does she, in her opinion, merit attention? Her short answer: her view of the world might be of interest to others, in her new novel, for instance, she describes her relationship and break-up with a former lover, she writes about feelings, today so few writers deal with feelings. And by the way, since she’s been here she’s discovered she has a body. Not only in the literary sense but literally: she sits for painters. She has so many requests, I’d be amazed! Some of them fancy themselves as painters, for others it’s a pastime—painting a live model—and yet others pursue it for its therapeutic value. This is an affluent country, people can afford to amuse themselves. She spends hours on Facebook and dating sites, that’s how she learns about all sorts of people, builds her characters, this all helps her in her writing. And along the way she’s on the lookout for a husband. Somebody, in fact, who would help her get her papers. Her first book is rich with selfies, multimedial prose, is that the proper phrase? Her fingerprint, too, is a selfie. Everything is her fingerprint. She doesn’t read as much as she used to, in fact she hardly reads at all, first of all she has no time for it, and, second, she’s so bored. She’s bored by the way other people see the world, she has quite enough on her hands with her own . . . view. Again she flashes her teeth, fine as rice grains. She thinks art must fight for its audience, for its readers, listeners, and viewers. Literary value is all about lobbying. Her ultimate goal is to draw the biggest number of devotees to her side. In this sense she has no morals. Anything is better than semi-anonymity. Recently she read that somewhere in America, in a hotel, they’d furnished a
room as a faithful copy of Van Gogh’s room, the one in Arles with the yellow wooden bed. And people are wild about spending a night there. The Dutch must be tearing out their hair because they should’ve been the first to come up with the idea and build a hotel near the Van Gogh museum with replicas in it of Van Gogh’s rooms. How gorgeous is that, to snuggle into a famous work of art, spend the night in a “painting,” and pay for it cheerfully in the morning. She’d like readers to nestle into her book the way they would into a hotel room, spend the night there, and pay in the morning. Everything matters when selling a product, and a literary work is a product. She, for example, is aware that physical appearance is a big plus. That’s why she pays such close attention to her appearance. She, herself, never reads books by ugly authors. The famous artist, the queen of performance art from “our” little backwater, is absolutely right when she insists, while brushing her beautiful thick hair vehemently to the point of physical pain, that art must be beautiful . . .