Alma has another man, and for that reason she buys two of everything when it comes to gifts. Two identical sweaters. And in addition, two identical bottles of aftershave. That way she does not carry different coloured wool from one set of arms to another, or different male scents. It reduces the risk of being found out. What about hair, I ask, you always hear stories about that; but she has a lint roller in her bag that she just runs up and down herself, and close-cropped men do not shed much hair. She flirts with every man we come across; in the department store she approaches three different men to hear their opinions on aftershave before she settles on one for her two men back home.
In reality there is a third person she is thinking of and longing for, but she can’t have him, and not even having two men can make up for that one. When she describes his kiss, I can almost feel it myself: ‘He placed his hands around my mouth – he shielded my lips so that they were the only thing in the world, and then he kissed between his hands; his tongue was slow and light; he used only the tip, and after a moment it was as though I was made of a weightless, floating material.’
But she could not have him; he was a mountain climber and would not leave his Welsh mountains behind. They spent a single night together, in an empty dormitory at the youth hostel. Kristian was lying ill at the other end of the corridor. The door could not be locked, so they dragged a table in front of it and then positioned it so the handle was forced upward and the door could not be opened from outside. They were sitting in their underwear in the barricaded room, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes and listening to music, when suddenly Alma saw herself from the outside and said: ‘You would think we were sitting on a beach.’
Outside there were mountains, it was not even a little bit warm. He replied that physically speaking, she was certainly very beautiful. And it reminded her of how black as coal, how deceitful her insides were.
When she awoke in the morning, lying with him in the upper bunk, the only thing on her mind was that she had to have him one more time. She woke him up so there would be enough time. And she had him once more, and it was so bittersweet because they were to be parted, and because one day we are all going to depart, everything heeled over and capsized and broke and turned into I want and I want, and then I think she said something about pomegranates, or no, he had said that she reminded him of one of those fruits that are soft on the outside and hard on the inside. But then they had to part. She caught a final glimpse of him as she passed through reception where he was huddled over a map with a couple of friends. When she opened the door to Kristian, or rather threw it open, she stood bolt upright like an Olympic rider and had never felt more alive in her entire life. The following day she wrote a letter to him that sounded like it came from For Whom the Bell Tolls or A Farewell to Arms, where she was overrun with love, and later when she had arrived home from the trip, she wrote another letter, before finally receiving a reply. She put his letter down and grew sober and cold. His letter contained a description of a minor incident about him climbing a cliff in darkness, the only good part of the letter; the rest was a plea to abandon any thought of them because of the distance and the different lifestyles, (she had even aired the thought of studying mountain climbing at a school on Bornholm in order to approach his way of life) and then a pale request to write back. She decided to liberate the short passage from his letter and wrote:
We were climbing a cliff that is around one hundred and fifty metres high, when it began to get dark (my watch had stopped, and we had left much later than we had thought). We were around fifty metres from the top when it went completely dark, and we could not go back down because the water had risen and there was no longer a beach beneath us, but a sea.
We climbed the last fifty metres in darkness – but the beam from a lighthouse flashed against the cliff around every seventeen seconds. When the light fell upon the cliff, we searched for the next crevice to place our hands or feet and pulled ourselves up, blinded by the light that washed across us. It went dark again, and over the course of the following few seconds our eyes would grow used to the darkness. Then the light returned. It went on like that until around midnight, when at long last we reached the summit.
She later binned the letter and lay down on a floor that smelled of wood and soap, because then she could not get any lower, and she remained lying there for what must have felt like six months. And later she sent the story about the cliff to a journal, together with a couple of other pieces she had written herself, and had them published in her name. The theft was not revenge for her unrequited love, it was just an excellent, if not unassuming bit of prose that deserved to see the light of day – to be read, Alma thought. And the mountain climber would have had no objections. He had no literary ambitions.
Once in a while she reached out for Ulysses, because as she now felt so terrible, she might as well attempt to finally make it all the way through the book. And now she was here, with me, and was able to say that it would never have worked out.
‘But during those six months on the floor, you still managed to meet someone to buy aftershave for?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you kept Kristian.’
‘For the time being. Yes. I do not have the energy to rid myself of him.’
‘Do you also want to rid yourself of the other one?’
We lay on the bed. It could have been anywhere in the world. Because Alma was there, I felt at home.
‘I wanted a daring life for myself,’ she said, ‘like on the cliff, a life lit up by flashes from a lighthouse.’
‘A life with lighthouses, cliffs, flashes and a sudden and total darkness,’ she sighed.
‘Remember to turn off the heating pad before we leave,’ I said.
‘And hold on tight until your nails turn white,’ I said wearily, because she could not seem to let go of the cliff in her mind.
‘Only the nails, which have been completely abandoned by the blood, illuminate the darkness,’ I continued, ‘but now I need something to eat.’
‘Oh,’ Alma said, ‘then we had better get going’ – and then she reminded me for the God-knows-how-many-times of the night in Venice, half a lifetime ago, when I was so hungry and she couldn’t decide on a restaurant, that in the end I slapped her across the face, but as soon as I had done it, I said: ‘Hurry up and slap me, otherwise I’ll hear about it for the rest of my life.’
And so she did, but she looked as though she had been forced to cross a line, whereas my slap, I am sorry to say, had practically grown out of my hand naturally. Half in shock and with one hand against her cheek she stepped forward and slapped me on the cheek I had turned to her.
Before we set off, Alma looks at the map. A single glance is enough, then she is familiar with it. We are going to the Nikola Tesla Museum. Just who is Nikola Tesla? Nikola Tesla is ostensibly one of the greatest geniuses, physicists, electrical engineers and inventors of the nineteenth century; Serbian, born in Croatia in 1856, emigrated to the USA where he was initially employed by Thomas Edison (proponent of direct current, obstinate opponent of alternating current), later financed by J. P. Morgan, and died, unnoticed and alone, in a small room in the New Yorker Hotel in 1943, considered an eccentric (because he spoke at length about the possibility of transmitting images, among other things), after having presented humanity with the gift of alternating current (think of Tesla when you switch on the lights), the radio (even though Marconi received the credit, Tesla was awarded the patent two years after his own death), the remote control, the robot and more still (he held hundreds of patents) and after, it should be added, many years living the high life, keeping company with the greatest minds of the time, Mark Twain among others. He would go to work like he was attending a banquet, wearing white tie and tails and gloves. He was lean and elegant. He loved pigeons and was often seen pictured with them up and down his arms, like a statue. And that’s all from the bag of myths. Except of course that there was a terrible thunderstorm the day he was born – electricity welcom
ed its master with the greatest of orchestras.
‘We’re here,’ Alma says and plants a finger on the street the hotel lies on, Dobračina, ‘first we have to cross Aleksandra Nevskog,’ (‘that’s the square with the equestrian statue where a crowd of Serbian nationalists protest every day, and which I have to cross when I buy bagels,’ I say, ‘they want Kosovo back’) ‘down Francuska, continue along Bulevar Despota Stefana, let’s take that one for the name alone, though it might not be the fastest route, down Dečanska and Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra – and yes, then Krunska, where the museum is situated.’
She checks the map again.
‘Should we take it with us just in case?’
Alma shakes her head three times like a circus horse. And then we leave.
This museum is also under renovation. But half of it, the ground floor, is still accessible. I stare at Tesla’s machines but they are beyond my understanding. But this much I can say: there is something resembling a golden egg, standing on the pointy end of something resembling a truncated drum (or a small arena) and it is the same green as an examination desk.
Tesla’s urn stands on a pedestal, round as a globe but with small feet. I doubt it really contains any ashes. And if there are… then is the dust able to rest amongst shrieking Serbian schoolchildren on a tour and surrounded by inventions of ‘the porter of dust’: a button is continually pressed, and a noise follows as the mechanism activates, the machine clicks into gear / but perhaps for the dust it is music to the ear. I could gain access to this world, but it would take time. On the other hand I immediately recognize the description of the mind that created the inventions:
In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thought and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those I imagined. When a word was spoken to me, the picture of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety.
This, the tangibility of intangibility that Tesla describes in his autobiography, My Inventions, later made him capable of envisaging his discoveries (they also presented themselves in flashes of lightning) as ready-made, as though they were already on the table in front of him. Then all he would have to do is construct them according to ‘his vision’, so to speak.
In 1926, another genius of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf, wrote in her diary:
Returning Health
This is shown by the power to make images: the suggestive power of every sight and word is enormously increased. Shakespeare must have had this to an extent which makes my normal state the state of a person blind, deaf, dumb, stone-stockish & fish-blooded. And I have it compared with poor Mrs Bartholomew almost to the extent that Shakespeare has it compared with me.
… Is it not conspicuous that two minds, one of a physicist and one of an artist, can be endowed with the same kind of power? That the same power can offer such diverse yields, alternating current and The Waves.
But now to the book fair – to the book fair in Belgrade. We meet the lecturer outside a new, grand exhibition centre, a kind of oversized glass cage. To some extent the lecturer has acted as a middleman between Alma and her publishers, speaking Serbian as he does, and a resident of Belgrade and friendliness incarnate. But the lecturer looks mortified.
‘Why the mortified look, lecturer?’
There are two reasons.
The publisher has not arranged for our passes to the fair. (‘Do I have to pay to attend my own reading?’ Alma asks incredulously. The lecturer can only nod.)
But there is no reading. The publisher did not expect anyone to show up to Alma’s reading (with the lecturer serving as interpreter) or to hear her speak about the book, since she is completely unknown in Serbia. (But that’s the very reason I’ve been flown here, Alma says.) However, a number of interviews have been arranged. ‘Oh,’ Alma says, brightening up.
We buy our tickets and as we go inside we are warned that if we exit, we cannot get back in – without purchasing new tickets. There is a poor indoor climate at the temple of books. Lots and lots of stands. The lecturer leads us through the labyrinth. We reach the stand for Alma’s publisher. Alma’s publishing house was founded by a blind man. Alma’s publisher looks like an intellectual from decades past. Wearing a corduroy jacket et cetera. Charming. Sitting round a table is a group of older men wearing overcoats and dark glasses. ‘Those are the blind people,’ the lecturer says. They are drawn to this place like bees to sugar water, now they sit and drink in the background. I myself am extremely short-sighted. I don’t wear glasses, only sunglasses with lenses, I use them when I watch TV. Charles thinks it is a little sombre when I sit on the sofa on a winter afternoon hiding behind my sunglasses. Alma offers her hand. There is one person who is not blind. She has read Alma’s book. She does not care for it, we can tell. Maybe it has been translated nonchalantly. Suggests the lecturer. In any case Alma has found a name in the translation that she does not recognize. ‘Who is that?’ she asks the translator and points at the name. The translator shrugs.
‘You’ve simply introduced an extra character,’ the lecturer says.
‘It’s post-modernism,’ the translator says.
I feel like I should contradict him, or ask him to expand on it, but the exhibition hall has a sleep-inducing effect on me.
Alma gives six interviews over the course of the next hour. None of the people in attendance have read her book. But the more Alma speaks, the less important that is. ‘And now the author is going to say something funny,’ one of the journalists says, and Alma recites some muddled nonsense about Hamlet, something along the lines that if Hamlet had been Finnish, then… no, it’s impossible to remember. She goes on and on. The publisher hands her a shot, and then she talks even more. Now Serbian TV arrives. She insists on being shown with her publisher, ‘my Serbian publisher,’ and places an arm around him. His shoulders stiffen. A sighted friend of one of the blind people makes a video of her for personal use, ‘she’s quite the character,’ he says, almost to himself, and Alma beams. ‘It’s difficult to stop talking,’ she says during a break. The publisher suggests she get a little fresh air. He wants to lend us some employee passes so we don’t have to pay to re-enter. All we have to do is ring his mobile when we return. So we do that – after a long and liquid lunch – and he comes out of the exhibition centre and drags us around to the car park and gets us to duck down behind some cars so the guards at the entrance (who look like proper skinheads) can’t see us, and then he clips the book fair cards to our clothes. He very nearly breaks out in an innocent whistling when we pass the guards.
[Alma]
So it is done. I have left. (The day after I returned from Belgrade with the journey still lingering inside me.) It was like pulling up an enormous root from of the earth – I fell back with a thud and found myself on the pavement, with a suitcase in each hand. Goodbye windows, and goodbye brick. And goodbye Kristian, I can see you behind the curtains, goodbye dry, dusty life, goodbye rules, goodbye worries, goodbye terrible and devastating quarrels, and goodbye sweetness (by now, you only fell in drops) and goodbye beautiful, practically translucent eyes, but I have to be careful now, otherwise I’ll just walk back up the stairs, goodbye goodbye, because I mean it. This morning I informed him of my decision. It is already afternoon. At first he began to pace around the living room with long, vigorous steps, round the dining room table, over to the sofa. His body was moving so powerfully that it frightened me; like there was a cliff lurking somewhere in the living room where he could drag us both into the abyss. I wrapped my arms around his chest and tried to keep him calm, but he took no notice of my embrace, he tore himself away and stormed round the table again and into the kitchen and back into the living room. But suddenly he went quiet. He lay down on
the bed and did not say a word while I packed my clothes. He just followed my movements. When I was finished, he got up, almost mechanically, and strode after me to the door. He closed it immediately after me. For a moment it was like I was pasted to the door.
It is Sunday, there are families out on walks. Frederiksberg is very red and very heavy. The road is as wide as a racing track. I feel a twitching inside me to move fast, I sense it as something equine. Good thing we never managed to have a child and become one of these families behind a heavy red brick wall. Kristian asked me about it once, and as ill luck would have it I replied: ‘You’re like a child yourself. I’m not having another one.’
Companions Page 10
