David Albahari - Leeches

tulumba myself, said Jaša. And then, I said the next day to Marko, what came next was the two of them going on about all the other delicacies, the cream pastries like krempita and šampita, the sudǽuk and chocolate roll, the halva and chestnut purée, ice cream and lenja pita. Murat must have made all the pastries under the sun, I said. Marko shook his head. Let me get this straight, he said, on Friday evening, just as the holy day is beginning for Jews, you are standing in the synagogue courtyard quibbling about pastry? After all that, he asked, did you buy the man a lemonade? Yes, I said, but because Murat had shut down his shop, we went to the Majestic, where, as soon as we walked in, a friend of theirs showed up, an old actor, who sat at our table and regaled us with stories of what happens to actors when they tour the provinces. And then I felt certain again that I had seen the woman from the quay entering a gallery across the street. I said that a meeting had slipped my mind and that I would have to leave at once. By the time we'd said our goodbyes, and Dacca had showed me the Parisian label in his hat, and the actor had launched into a story of what happened to them on a visit to Leskovac, there was no one left over at the gallery. It was dark upstairs and down. So it goes every single time, I had thought, though I didn't tell Marko this, either I get there too late, like this time, or too early, like the day when I went into the courtyard on Zmaj Jovina Street and sat down on the bench in the corner, thereby missing the opportunity of running into her when she came out of the building. I don't know why I decided not to mention any of this to Marko. We were sitting in his kitchen, drinking coffee and smoking hashish that someone he knew had brought him from Amsterdam, and just as I was retelling the actor's last anecdote, I felt myself sinking. It was not, in fact, a real slump, but a sensation of unexpected shrinking, as if the hashish had set something off in me, a little switch that had totally changed my perspective, making me see everything from a low, bottom-up angle, as if the people and things surrounding me, and even whole realms, loomed suddenly large or, at least, unpleasantly elongated. Marko knew about this, moreover, he had had similar experiences several times, though in his case, or as he told it to me, more often he seemed to be growing, while everything else shrank. We never sorted out whether in both our cases this was a question of original experience, or if one of the two of us had gone through it and then told the other what had happened, and the other then had had the impression that he had experienced the same thing, because neither of us could remember who had first had the experience we called "the Alice," after the episode in the cartoon of Alice in Wonderland in which she nibbles the mushroom, or was it cake, and alternately grows bigger and smaller. I've got the Alice, I would say, which came in handy, particularly when we were in company or in a public place, because the Alice could, at times, be headstrong and rocky. That day, at the exact moment I was describing what had happened the night I left the Majestic and crossed the street, I was hit by a wave of the Alice, and though in my story I stayed at pavement level, I began to sink, and when in the story I looked at the upper level, where it was also dark, in the Alice I also looked up and saw Marko's face towering over me, in a space neither light nor dark. I don't know if I am making myself clear enough. In any case, it would not be good for someone to think, when I describe the experience called the Alice, that I am trying to attribute to it a mystical property or profound significance. It was a minor, silly optical illusion caused by the action of some of the ingredients of the cannabis on who knows which brain cells, and like many similar insights caused by intoxicating substances, it readily lent itself to the most varied interpretations. This is our remarkable ability as humans to attribute a meaning to everything, as if nothing happens just because it happens, as if everything is a basis or a mirror of a secret, if not the secret itself, whatever that secret might be. The greatest secret, Marko once said, is that there are no secrets. Very few people, however, are willing to accept this premise, though I doubt many readers will have made it this far. Sometimes I'm not even sure I am writing this; perhaps I am only saying it; perhaps I am thinking that I am saying that I am writing; maybe not even that, but something altogether different, an interplay of images and sounds, a language that is no one's, least of all mine. Slowly, slowly, I have veered off course, soon it will turn out that I am talking to myself, like some drooling old man in the corner of a room, dirty and unshaven, in unbuttoned pants, no underwear, so that everyone can see his wrinkled penis and sagging balls. There, as soon as I mentioned Alice, that curious predecessor to Lolita, I knew we'd end up in someone's fly, searching for the mystical meaning of her name, a fall through a hole, a disappearing cat, and hysterical tea drinking. No, our Alice was an altogether minor, paltry experience under the influence of hashish, an illusion we knew to be an illusion, which does nothing to interfere with the real state of affairs, but runs parallel with it. So I looked at Marko from below, and I looked at him normally, with eyes that were level with his face, as always happens in the Alice, an experience that, now I see, we might think of calling something else. What frightened me this time, however, was the fact, the fact not the supposition, that on Marko's face hovered something so horrendous, an expression so rife with malice, that I felt my heart clench. It reminded me of the masks of New Guinea cannibals that hung above the bed of a girl I'd briefly gone out with some ten years before. When I first saw them, the blood froze in my veins. Later I got used to them, but when we made love I didn't dare look at the masks, I would close my eyes or twist my neck, terrified by the thought that one might come loose and crush me. Suddenly I no longer felt like talking, though Marko was pestering me with questions, and even when the Alice was over and all the perspectives leveled off, when I could see perfectly well how the gentle features of his face had, under the influence of the cannabis, taken on a grimace of horror, not even then could I force myself to keep going. I told Marko I was tired, that I was behind again with my piece for Minut, and though he tried to entice me to stay by rolling a new joint, I headed home. The night before, when I had gone to the gallery and found it dark inside, I had noticed the open door to the neighboring café, and there, at the bottom of the glass door, that same symbol I had found near the Zemun open market. It's hard to believe that I even spotted it in the half-darkness, as if I had developed special receptors in my brain that had only one task: spot the circle and triangles. How much time had elapsed since I'd first seen them? Sometimes it felt as if March 8 was only yesterday, at other times I thought that it had all happened years before; once though, when I'd dozed off, I believed that it was only about to start, while another time, just after I'd woken up, it was clear it would never stop, though the truth, as often happens, was simpler: it was still April, an Eliot-like April, the cruelest month, which meant that slightly more than a month had passed, five weeks, maybe six, from the moment I'd witnessed the unpleasant, and I must quickly add, unconvincing slap on the Danube riverbank. Everything that had happened, and that I had learned, still meant nothing to me, but I also knew, or, to be more precise, sensed that behind it all, there was something that would open at some moment, at a time extremely difficult to predict, just then, entirely certain in its uncertainty, no matter how absurd that might sound. But the absurd had become ordinary, commonplace, something we'd become used to these past ten years in a country that was not a proper country participating in a war that was not a real war, subjecting ourselves to a government that had anointed itself the government, becoming an island that was floating, set apart from the world like a leprosy colony that no one wanted to touch. There is your explanation, as Marko would say, the reason you are investing so much hope and expectation in that symbol, a mere geometric construct, which may conceal nothing in particular, but for that reason is powerful enough to draw your thoughts away from the chaos and commotion surrounding you. That may well be so, Marko is often right, indeed uncomfortably right, all the more reason for me not to tell him everything that had happened the night before. When I had caught sight of the symbol on the door of the café, I wasn't prepared at first to believe that it was the same geometric figure, the one that Dragan Mišović had explained, or at least tried to explain, to me. A startling likeness, I thought as I came closer to the café door and bent over to check. It even occurred to me that I should call him and ask how to explain the resemblance, and whether in mathematical terms there were, as one might say for people, kindred spirits. So, was there a spirit in mathematics? Were numbers conscious? I was thinking about this and similar nonsense as I bent down in front of the open door of the café and, kneeling, nearly touched the glass with my nose. There could be no doubt: it was the same symbol, drawn to the same proportions, even if some of the lines were a shade thicker. Once I was finally convinced, I ventured into the café, lifting each foot high as if afraid that I might trip over an invisible thread connecting the symbol to whatever and hoping at the same time for an explanation as to what it was doing here in the middle of Belgrade after the many sightings in Zemun. To my disappointment the café was empty. The only person there was a young man behind the counter, his head shaved smooth, dressed all in black, a small gold earring in his right ear. As I entered he was inserting a silver disc into the sound system, with his back to me. Everything gleamed in the gray semidarkness, the disc, the earring, and the back of his head, especially the back of his head, down which the rays of light slid as if alive. He caught sight of me in the mirror but turned around only after the disc had slid into the system, and then only to say, She's up there, and he gestured at the ceiling with his thumb. After that we were plashed by a wave of music from the band Morphine, a pounding bass and the moan of a saxophone. I stared at him. His lips moved again: I couldn't hear anything though I decided he wasn't addressing me, but mouthing the words of the song thundering in the café. Nonetheless I tried and I shouted as loudly as I could, Who is up there? The young man looked at me, scowled, then came close, nearly resting his lips against my ear. I can't hear you, he said. His breath tickled my ear and made me laugh. He moved his head and placed his ear in front of my lips. I smelled the sweet fragrance of lotion and saw the little hairs that had started traitorously growing. I was asking, I said, who is up there and why you told me. I tried carefully not to touch him but failed; my lips did touch the whorls of his ear several times. Again we changed positions, and his breath filled my ear. I don't know anything, he shouted, except she said I should send up the one who came in after her, dressed like you are dressed. He stepped away and gestured behind me, and only then did I see the beginning of a staircase leading to an upper level. I went over to the stairs, leaned on the banister, and looked up. There, I thought, reigned real darkness, but once I had climbed up I saw I'd been wrong. On each table was a lamp, so the room was filled with little oases of light, between which the dark was denser, but only for one or at most one and a half steps, which was all it took to move from table to table. Then I saw her hand. The lamps on the tables had low shades, so the heads and upper parts of the bodies of the guests were framed in a pale twilight, while the hands and lower arms shone with outlandish brightness, which is why I first saw her hands, almost unreal in their whiteness, and only then, above the edge of the light, her face, stippled with dark. I cannot recall how many tables were taken, perhaps there was no one else on the upper level, but I seem to recall a fragment of conversation, muffled laughter, which reached us when we fell silent and which persuaded me that someone was laughing at me. Each time I'd smooth my hair, feel my face with my fingertips, brush the corners of my mouth, press the tip of my nose. I think she never took her eyes off me. So all the while I was wondering, and here, that's the reason I was not prepared to tell Marko about it — sensing that, guided by male logic, he would have no understanding for such a subtle point — all the while I was wondering whether she could feel it in her fingertips, which rested on the table, how my heart was pounding, since I was seated at an angle and the left side of my chest rested against the table's edge. What did we talk about, or did we talk at all, or else did we take turns blurting out disconnected sentences? Everything was chopped, distinct, as if, while sitting at the same table, we were in different time zones and speaking to ourselves. I managed once or twice to bring up the Danube, but I didn't make it to the scene by the riverbank because she stopped me, lifting her hand or arching an eyebrow. May I at least know, I asked, your name? Of course, she said. I waited. Margareta, she said. She had two birthmarks on her left temple, freckles on her cheekbones, silken hairs above the corners of her lips, a small scar on the tip of her chin. I fell from a bicycle when I was small, she said, and touched the scar with the tip of her index finger. A scrap of someone's laughter floated over to us, and I quickly touched my cheeks and nose. The music in the lower part of the café swelled, the noise mounted the stairs, the drum and bass repeated the same monotonous, hypnotic beat, and I could feel the floor vibrate. I felt something else: nausea at the dense cigarette smoke, and I knew that I would wake up the next morning with a horrific headache. I wiped my forehead. I noticed worry flash through her eyes; I could see nothing when I took a closer look. I asked her if she would like to take a walk. A little fresh air, I said, would be nice. She nodded silently. But first I need to go and splash my face, I added, if she didn't mind waiting. She shook her head. I got up and went quickly down the stairs. In the mirror of the men's room I saw I was pale. I splashed my face and rubbed it with a paper towel. The paper was thin and tore, stuck to my fingers. How long did I stay there? Five minutes, ten, certainly no longer, not even that, but when I went back up she wasn't there. At first I assumed that she too had gone to the toilet, so I sat there calmly, legs crossed, sipping cold coffee. I stared at the table, Margareta didn't come back, the music got louder, and someone at a neighboring table swore ardently, someone else laughed, and finally I realized she was gone. I stood up abruptly, prepared to run, though I could barely walk for the misery of it, then, pressing against the table with the palms of my hands, I noticed a slip of paper protruding from under her saucer. I sat again. The paper, torn from a small pad, was folded twice, and it smelled just a little, when I sniffed it, of some long since forgotten perfume, something like patchouli or vanilla, no longer in fashion. I unfolded the paper and then quickly folded it again and turned to look around, and only then did I smooth out the scrap of paper and read what was written on it: A dream uninterpreted is like a letter unread. I knew the sentence, it had been on the back of the manuscript that the gray-haired man had given me. I turned over the scrap of paper and looked at the other side: nothing was written there, nothing sketched, despite my hopes to the contrary. I got up, picked up the check, and as I was making my way to the stairs I noticed a crumpled ball of paper under the table. A terrible silence suddenly reigned and all eyes were on me. In fact, no one was looking my way, the din had grown even more raucous, new guests were mounting the stairs, the waiter was carrying a tray with cups of cappuccino and little bottles of Coca-Cola, so I could bend down calmly and pick up the uneven paper ball. Just in case, however, I didn't smooth it out in the café. I shoved it into my jeans pocket, and there it remained until I got home. Even then I didn't smooth it out right away, but placed it on the table in the living room, sat in the armchair, and stared at it. For some reason I was sure that the crumpled paper held the real message and that the message left under the saucer had merely been a decoy, an illusion of a message, a distraction for someone who was not meant to learn anything. I tried to remember the appearance of the people sitting at the other tables, but they mingled, pale and paltry, always outshone by Margareta's face, and only one face came back to me in its entirety, the face of the young man at the bar, glowing with a light that, halo-like, reflected from his shaven head. I even recalled the earring in his right ear, slightly drooping, though nicely shaped. Perhaps Margareta's acts of caution were a routine she held to in every situation, regardless of whether there was real danger or not? I reached out to the paper ball, touched it with the tip of my index finger. Measures of caution, peril, a mask, and a distraction? What was I thinking? I looked at the finger with which I had touched the edge of the paper as if I expected to see a drop of blood on it. Then I licked it and raised it to the air, as I used to do when I was a boy, to determine which way the wind was blowing; where the saliva on the finger felt cooler, that was where the wind was blowing from. Nothing was moving in the room, of course, and the finger remained equally moist on all sides. I took a handkerchief out of my pocket, wiped my finger, then went to the window. I looked to the left, looked to the right, surveyed the street lit by the flickering light of the street lamps, and in the fragmented reflections in the windowpane I sought the reflection of the paper ball behind my back. Down there on the street, two pedestrians were moving from opposite sidewalks to cross the street at the same time, as if in a math problem, and I assumed that someone somewhere was calculating where they would meet. One of the pedestrians was much taller, which probably meant that his stride would be longer, but if he was melancholic by nature, then he would walk more slowly, which would give the second pedestrian, shorter and broader and irrepressibly optimistic, the advantage, despite the fact that his stride was shorter. Paying no attention to the demands of this challenging task, the pedestrians met precisely at the yellow line, which divided the street into two equal parts, and it even seemed to me that they nodded in greeting. I waited for each to cross over to the opposite sidewalk and walk on, then all there was to watch was the traffic light, but the pattern of its changes quickly became too predictable. There was no putting it off, I said to myself, but I waited for all three colors to follow one after the other once more. I went over to the table, uncrumpled the ball, and smoothed out the paper. I saw the familiar geometric figure, and below it, a six-digit number, which, there could be no doubt, was a phone number. I don't know what I was expecting: perhaps a few sentences, something more complex; this seemed simple, too simple for a story about the Kabbalah and cryptic occurrences. I took the paper, brought it to my nose, and sniffed. It had no smell. I checked the other side; it was empty, as had been the reverse side of the other scrap of paper. Now, easy, I said to myself, easy. Maybe there was something that should be done with that number, a mathematical operation, finding the right path, which would lead to the true meaning. A moment later I wondered what I was doing here: the country was in a state of collapse, threats of bombardment hung in the air like overripe fruit, people were snapping apart as if they had been made of Lego blocks, lunacy had nearly been declared the norm, and here I was tinkering with Kabbalistic mysteries and anti-Jewish conspiracies, and wasting hours and days to discover who had left tracks in river mud that had long since been washed away. I should have turned around there and then, shrugged it all off, headed in the opposite direction, forgotten Eleazar and his passage to the other world, returned to my messy, everyday life, to stories of politics and shifts in government, to exercises in the skill of survival, but just as I hadn't done that to begin with, so I didn't listen to myself now, and when I lifted the receiver my hand was shaking. The phone rang after only a few seconds, the first time with interference, then more clearly and loudly, until after the fifth or sixth ring it went quiet. Hello, I said, and my voice dropped like a stone into a void. I pressed the receiver against my ear: no more crackling, but now I was convinced that someone was saying something in a whisper or, perhaps, shouting from a great distance. Hello, I said again, feeling like a person who, leaning over the stone rim, speaks into the depths of a well. I waited a moment longer, then hung up. Where had I gone wrong? Again I remembered Dragan Mišović: perhaps more refined mathematical calculations were called for, more complex operations, a more sophisticated knowledge of algebra or whatever, something there was no way I could see when I looked at the numbers written on the crumpled scrap of paper. Then I picked up the phone again and dialed the same number, remembering the advice of the secretary atЧитать дальше