20
We’d get to the gravel beach, near the dam dividing the two lakes. I’d have to sit on the prostrate towel for a while before I would be allowed to swim. On the left, there would usually be an old man, his skin puckered here and there, a spy novel over his face, white hair bristling meekly on his chest, his belly ascending and descending nearly imperceptibly, with a large metallic-green fly on the brim of his navel. On our right, two symmetrical old men, with straw hats and baggy trunks, would play chess in serene silence, with their doughy breasts overlooking the board. There would be three children a little farther away. They would sit on their towel, gathered around a woman, probably their mother, who would distribute tomatoes and slices of bread with a layer of sallow spread on them. The children would all simultaneously bite into their slices and their tomatoes, and then chew vigorously. The tomato slime would drip down their chins, they would be seemingly unperturbed, but when they were done eating, the mother would wipe their recalcitrant faces with a stained white rag.
21
Finally, my parents would tell me I could swim and I’d totter over the painful gravel and enter the shallows. I would see throbbing jellyfish floating by. The rocks at the bottom were covered with slimy lichen. I’d hesitantly dive and the shock of coldness would make me feel present in my own body—I’d be aware that my skin was the border between the world and me. Then I’d stand up, the quivering lake up to my nipples, and I’d wave to my parents and they’d shout: “Five more minutes!”
22
Sometimes I’d see fish in pellucid water, gliding along the bottom. Once I saw a school of fish that looked like miniature swordfish, with silver bellies and pointed needle-noses. They were all moving as one and then they stopped before me, and hundreds of little wide-open eyes stared at me in dreadful surprise. Then I blinked and they flitted away.
23
We walked up the path as the sun was setting. Everything attained a brazen shade and, now and then, there would be a thin gilded beam, like a spear, sticking out of the ground. Cicadas were revving and the warmth of the ground enhanced the fragrance of dry pine needles on the path. I entered the stretch of the path that had been in the shadow of the tall pines for a while, and the sudden coolness made me conscious of how hot my shoulders felt. I pressed my thumb firmly against my shoulder and, when I lifted it, a pallid blot appeared, then it slowly shrank, back into the ruddiness.
24
There was a man holding a German shepherd on a leash, much of which was coiled around his hand. The shepherd was attempting to jump at a mongoose backed against a short ruin of a stone wall. As the dog’s jaw snapped a breath away from the mongoose’s snout, the man pulled the dog back. The mongoose’s hair bristled up, and it grinned to show its teeth, appearing dangerous, but I knew it was just madly scared. The eyes had a red glow, akin to the glow that people who glanced at the flashbulb have on bad color photos. The dog was growling and barking and I saw the pink-and-brown gums and the bloodthirsty saliva running down the sides of the jaw. Then the man let the dog go and there was, for just a moment, hissing and wheezing, growling and shrieking. The man yanked the dog back and the mongoose lay on its back, showing its teeth in a useless scowl, the paws spread, as if showing it was harmless now, and the eyes were wide open, the irises stretched to the edge of the pupils, flabbergasted. There was a hole in its chest—the dog seemed to have bitten off a part of it—and I saw the heart, like a tiny tomato, pulsating, as if hiccuping, slower and slower, with slightly longer moments between the throbs, and it simply stopped.
25
As we walked through the dusk, my sandals would fill with pine needles and I would have to stop to take them out. Thousands of fireflies floated in the shrubs, lighting and vanishing, as if they were hidden fairy-photographers with flashbulbs, taking our snapshots. “Are you hungry?” my mother asked.
26
We would sit under the cloak of vines, with a rotund jar of limpid honey and a plate of pickles. Uncle Julius would dip a pickle into the honey and several bees would peel themselves off the jar and hover above the table. I would dip my finger and try to get it to my lips before the thinning thread of honey dripped on my naked thighs, but I would never make it.
Sometimes, around lunch time, Uncle Julius would take me to his apiary. He would put on a white overall and a white hat with a veil falling down on his chest, so he looked like a bride. He would light a torn rag and order me to hold it, so as to repel the bees. He would tell me to be absolutely silent and not to move and not to blink. I’d peek from behind his back, my hand with the smoldering rag stretching out. He would take the lid off a beehive, carefully, as if he were afraid of awakening the island, and the buzz would rise like a cloud of dust and linger around us. He would scrape off the wax between the frames and then take them out, one by one, and show them to me. I’d see the molasses of bees fidgeting. “They work all the time,” he’d whisper. “They never stop.” I’d be frightened by the possibility of being stung, even though he told me that the bees would not attack me if I pretended not to exist. The fear would swell, and the more I’d think about it, the more unbearable the unease would be. Eventually, I’d break down and run back to the house, get on the stairs, from where I’d see him, remote, immobile—apart from the slow, wise motions of his apt hands. I’d watch him, as if he were projected on a screen of olive trees and aisles of beehives, then he’d turn to me and I could discern a peculiar, tranquil smile behind the veil.
27
Mother and Father were sitting at the stern, with their feet in tepid bilge water, Uncle Julius was rowing, and I was sitting at the prow, my feet dangling overboard. The surface of the lake would ascend with an inconspicuous wave and my feet would delve into the coolness of menthol-green water. With the adaggio of oars, creaking and splashing, we glissaded toward the lake island. There was a dun stone building, with small drawn-in windows, and an array of crooked olive trees in front of it. Uncle Julius steered the scow toward a short desolate pier. I slipped stepping out, but Uncle Julius grabbed my hand and I hung for a moment over the throbbing lake with a sodden loaf of bread and an ardently smiling woman on a magazine page, stuck to the surface like an ice floe.
28
“These lakes,” Uncle Julius said, “used to be a pirate haven in the sixteenth century. They’d hoard the loot and bring hostages here and kill them and torture them—in this very building—if they didn’t get the ransom. They say that this place is still haunted by the ghosts of three children they hung on meat hooks because their parents didn’t pay the ransom. Then this was a nunnery and some people used to believe that even the nuns were not nuns but witches. Then it was a German prison. And now, mind you, it’s a hotel, but there are hardly any tourists ever.”
29
We walked into the sonorous chill of a large stone-walled hall. There was a reception desk, but nobody behind it, and a smiling Tito-picture over the numbered cubbyhole shelf. Then we walked through a long tunnel and then through a low door, so everyone but me had to bow their heads, then we were in a cubicle-like windowless room (“This used to be a nun cell,” Uncle Julius whispered), then we entered the eatery (they had to bend their knees and bow their heads, as if genuflecting, again) with long wooden tables and, on them, two parallel rows of plates and utensils. We sat there waiting for the waiter. There was a Popsicle-yellow lizard, as big as a new pencil, on the stone wall behind Uncle Julius’s back. It looked at us with an unblinking marble eye, apparently perplexed, and then it scurried upward, toward an obscure window.
30
This was what Uncle Julius told us:
“When I was a young student in Moscow, in the thirties, I saw the oldest man in the world. I was in a biology class, it was in a gigantic amphitheater, hundreds of rows, thousands of students. They brought in an old man who couldn’t walk, so two comrades carried him and he had his arms over their shoulders. His feet were dangling between them, but he was all curled up like a baby. They said he was a hundred a
nd fifty-eight years old and from somewhere in the Caucasus. They put him sideways on the desk and he started crying like a baby, so they gave him a stuffed toy—a cat, I think, but I can’t be certain, because I was sitting all the way up in one of the last aisles. I was looking at him as if through the wrong side of a telescope. And the teacher told us that the old man cried all the time, ate only liquid foods, and couldn’t bear being separated from his favorite toy. The teacher said that he slept a lot, didn’t know his name and had no memories. He could say only a couple of words, like water, poo-poo and such. I figured out then that life is a circle, you get back right where you started if you get to be a hundred and fifty-eight years old. It’s like a dog chasing its own tail, all is for naught. We live and live, and in the end we’re just like this boy [he pointed at me], knowing nothing, remembering nothing. You might as well stop living now, my son. You might just as well stop, for nothing will change.”
31
When I woke up, after a night of unsettling dreams, the suitcases were agape and my parents were packing them with wrinkled underwear and shirts. Uncle Julius came up with a jar of honey as big as my head and gave it to my father. He looked at the photo of Mljet and then put the tip of his finger at the point in the upper-right corner, near the twin lakes, which looked like gazing eyes. “We are here,” he said.
32
The sun had not risen yet from behind the hill, so there were no shadows and everything looked muffled, as if under a sheet of fine gauze. We walked down the narrow road and the asphalt was cold and moist. We passed a man carrying a cluster of dead fish, with the hooks in their carmine gills. He said: “Good morning!” and smiled.
We waited at the pier. A shabby boat, with paint falling off and Pirate written in pale letters on the prow, was heading, coughing, toward the open sea. A man with an anchor tattooed on his right arm was standing at the rudder. He had a torn red-and-black flannel shirt, black soccer shorts, and no shoes—his feet were bloated and filthy. He was looking straight ahead toward the ferry that was coming into the harbor. The ferry slowed down to the point of hesitant floating, and then it dropped down its entrance door, like a castle bridge, with a harsh peal. It was a different ship than the ship we had come on, but the same man with the hobbling-boat shirt said: “Welcome!” again, and smiled, as if recognizing us.
We passed the same islands. They were like heavy, moulded loaves of bread, dropped behind a gigantic ship. On one of the islands, and we passed it close by, there was a herd of goats. They looked at us mildly confounded, and then, one by one, lost interest and returned to grazing. A man with a camera, probably a German tourist, took a picture of the goats, and then gave the camera to his speckle-faced, blue-eyed son. The boy pointed the camera toward the sun, but the man jokingly admonished him, turning him, and the camera, toward us, while we grinned at him, helpless.
33
It took us only four hours to get home from the coast and I slept the whole time, oblivious to the heat, until we reached Sarajevo. When we got home, the shriveled plants and flowers were in the midst of the setting-sun orange spill. All the plants had withered, because the neighbor who was supposed to water them died of a sudden heart attack. The cat, having not been fed for more than a week, was emaciated and nearly mad with hunger. I would call her, but she wouldn’t come to me; she would just look at me with irreversible hatred.
THE LIFE AND WORK
OF
ALPHONSE KAUDERS
Alphonse Kauders is the creator of The Forestry Bibliography, 1900–1948, published by the Engineers and Technicians Association, in Zagreb, 1949. This is a special bibliography related to forestry. The material is classified into seventy-three groups and encompasses 8,800 articles and theses. Bibliographical units are not numbered. The creator of The Forestry Bibliography was the first to catalog the entire forest matter in a single piece of work. The work has been viewed as influential.
Alphonse Kauders had a dog by the name of Rex, whose whelp, in the course of time, he gave to Josip B. Tito.
Alphonse Kauders had a mysterious prostate illness and, in the course of time, he said: “Strange are the ways of urine.”
Alphonse Kauders said to Rosa Luxemburg: “Let me penetrate a little bit, just a bit, I’ll be careful.”
Alphonse Kauders said: “And what if I am still here.”
Alphonse Kauders was the only son of his father, a teacher. He was locked up in a lunatic asylum, having attempted to molest seven seven-year-old girls at the same time. Father, a teacher.
Alphonse Kauders said to Dr. Joseph Goebbels: “Writing is a useless endeavor. It is as though we sign every molecule of gas, say, of air, which—as we all know—cannot be seen. Yet, signed gas, or air, is easier to inhale.”
Dr. Joseph Goebbels said: “Well, listen, that differs from a gas to a gas.”
Alphonse Kauders was the owner of the revolver used to assassinate King Alexander.
One of Alphonse Kauders’s seven wives had a tumor as big as a three-year-old child.
Alphonse Kauders said: “People are so ugly that they should be liberated from the obligation to have photos in their identity cards. Or, at least, in their Party cards.”
Alphonse Kauders desired, passionately, to create a bibliography of pornographic literature. He held in his head 3,700 pornographic books. Plus magazines.
Richard Sorge, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They sounded like sobs, sheer heartrending sorrow, which, resembling waves, emerged from the depths of one’s soul, and, then, broke down, someplace high, high above.”
Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, had to crawl on all fours for seven days, for his penis had been stung by seventy-seven bees.
Alphonse Kauders owned complete lists of highly promiscuous women in Moscow, Berlin, Marseilles, Belgrade, and Munich.
Alphonse Kauders was a Virgin in his horoscope. And in his horoscope only.
Alphonse Kauders never, never wore or carried a watch.
There are records suggesting that the five-year-old Alphonse Kauders amazed his mother by making “systematic order” in the house pantry.
Alphonse Kauders said to Adolf Hitler, in Munich, as they were guzzling down their seventh mug of beer: “God, mine is always hard when it is needed. And it is always needed.”
Alphonse Kauders:
a) hated forests
b) loved to watch fires
These proclivities were happily united in his notorious obsession with forest fires, which he would watch, with great pleasure, whenever he had a chance.
Josip B. Tito, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They sounded like all the sirens of Moscow on May 1, the International Labor Day.”
Alphonse Kauders impregnated Eva Braun, and she, in the course of time, delivered a child. But after Adolf Hitler began establishing new order and discipline and seducing Eva Braun, she, intoxicated by the Führer’s virility, sent the child to a concentration camp, forcing herself to believe it was only for the summer.
Alphonse Kauders hated horses. Oh, how Alphonse Kauders hated horses.
Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, truly believed that man created himself in the process of history.
Alphonse Kauders stood behind Gavrilo Princip, whispering—as urine was streaming down Gavrilo’s thigh, as Gavrilo’s sweating hand, holding a weighty revolver, was trembling in his pocket—Alphonse Kauders whispered: “Shoot, brother, what kind of a Serb are you?”
Alphonse Kauders described his relationship with Rex: “We, living in fear, hate each other.”
There are records that Alphonse Kauders spent some years in a juvenile delinquents’ home, having set seven forest fires in a single week.
Alphonse Kauders said: “I hate people, almost as much as horses, because there are always too many of them around, and because they kill bees, and because they fart and stink, and because they always come up with something, and it is the worst when they come up with irksome revolutions.”
&nb
sp; Alphonse Kauders wrote to Richard Sorge: “I cannot speak. Things around me do not speak. Still, dead, like rocks in a stream, they do not move, they have no meaning, they are just barely present. I stare at them, I beg them to tell me something, anything, to make me name them. I beg them to exist—they only buzz in the darkness, like a radio without a program, like an empty city, they want to say nothing. Nothing. I cannot stand the pressure of silence, even sounds are motionless. I cannot speak, words mean nothing to me. At times, my Rex knows more than I do. Much more. God bless him, he is silent.”
Alphonse Kauders knew by heart the first fifty pages of the Berlin phone book.
Alphonse Kauders was the first to tell Joseph V. Stalin: “No!”
Stalin asked him: “Do you have a watch, Comrade Kauders?” and Alphonse Kauders said: “No!”
Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, told the following: “In our party, there are two main factions: the Maniacs and the Killers. The Maniacs are losing their minds, the Killers are killing. Naturally, in neither of these two factions is there any women. Women are gathered in the faction called the Women. Chiefly, they serve as an excuse for bloody fights between the Maniacs and the Killers. The Maniacs are the better soccer team, but the Killers can do wonders with knives, like nobody else in this modern world of ours.”
Alphonse Kauders had gonorrhea seven times and syphilis only once.
Alphonse Kauders does not exist in the Encyclopedia of the USSR. Then again, he does not exist in the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia.
The Question of Bruno Page 2
