David Albahari - Leeches

Minut when I complained that I had not been able to get through to them for hours. Never trust our phones, she said then, not when someone's talking, or even saying nothing, and less still when you get a busy signal. This time the phone rang straight away. It rang loud and clear, so loud, in fact, that I had to move the receiver away from my ear. And her voice, when she came on, was the same. Thank you, she said. I never knew what that meant, what she was thanking me for, so I said nothing. I remembered how her hands gleamed in the café, and I wondered what the light was like where she was sitting now. I imagined a great old-fashioned chandelier, full of crystal balls and tinkling decorations, through which the light was refracted, making fragile, little rainbows. It is dark, she said, it's dark in my room. My hands no longer shook; now my palms were sweating. So that's why I didn't tell Marko everything, it was because of Margareta's ability, I don't know what else to call it, to read my thoughts. At the time I thought of this as an ability; now, despite everything, I believe it was a skill, difficult but possible to master, yet as far as Marko went, nothing would have changed had I known that then. Ability or skill, none of this would have meant a thing to him, regardless of distinctions, because he would not have accepted it, and he would have produced a scornful smile, maybe even a loud laugh. Yoda from Star Wars reads minds, he'd say, that doesn't happen in everyday, normal life. High time, he'd add, for me to stop living in the world of sci-fi and come back to this planet, no matter how chaotic it might be. I would have told him then that he didn't know what he was saying, that I am not afraid of chaos, and word by word we would have sunk into the lull of hashish, until we fell silent, drained, or we pounced on a box of wafer cookies. Marko had once calculated that in the course of our many years of getting high we had eaten nearly a freight car worth of wafer cookies, though I never corroborated his figures. And it wasn't just wafer cookies we ate, often we had Turkish delight, tea crescents, and chocolate-covered raisins. These are from Freight Car Number 2, Marko would say, and as far as he was concerned the discussion would be over. Pressing the phone to my ear, I looked around as if I were in my apartment for the first time, and said that my room too was dark. In fact only one lamp was on, and its wan light could have passed for a thin dusk, the first stage of proper darkness. I may not have said that, or at least not in so many words, I no longer remember, though it was not so very long ago that this happened, but I, like most people, remember pointless details better, the circumstances leading to a goal, while the goal itself, even when I reach it, tends to elude memory, as if in a dream in which, no matter how far we walk, or run, or ride a white stallion, we cannot get close to the outline of walls on the horizon or the shore of the emerald river. Of course I should have jotted everything down and not allowed the writing, as is happening now, to turn into an archeological excavation. Words are the goods that rot the fastest, as the editor at Minut once said, and I stared, astonished, at him, not because he rarely declared such sentiments, but because those words suddenly illuminated a multitude of things to me and made me think about language as a cluster of bananas. Nothing, indeed, rots as quickly as language, though bananas that have gone soft do have their charm. I don't believe I brought up bananas in my conversation with Margareta that evening. In some sense we picked up where the conversation in the café left off, though she didn't explain why she had had to leave so abruptly, and just as I had felt at the café that we were not actually having a conversation, so this exchange too turned into a sequence of choppy fragments on the way to silence. Then we stopped talking, and a moment later, without saying goodbye, she hung up. In the rustling void that followed, again I thought I could hear someone whispering from an unreachable distance, and I kept the phone to my ear for a long time, so that my ear, as I could see in the mirror as I got ready for bed, turned red like a poppy and hurt at the slightest touch. The next day I told Marko other things, and in the end he advised me to stay away from it all, because pretty soon, he said, I'd be wanting to become a Jew, and then, he pointed out, I would have to be circumcised. He winked and laughed. Enough of this. I must go back to a few other things that happened, because if I don't do it now I'll never catch up. This story has too many threads as it is, and it probably will never become a proper story. Stories are orderly, the threads in stories are harmoniously arranged, what I am doing here is more a reflection of life, which is chaotic, with too much going on at once. Life, I heard someone say, is like a puppet theater in which many of the strings have snapped, so each of us is an unhappy puppeteer trying to pull together and reconnect the strings into a workable whole, but keeps making mistakes. Life comes down to untangling knots, and even more to tying them again, but that simple act grows more complicated as the years pass, the fingers thicken or get stiff, the sight grows feeble, the teeth drop out. The puppets stagger around on the stage, they raise arms instead of legs, they swivel their heads when they should be looking straight, in the summer they seek shade and in the winter they ask for gloves and scarves, they complain of gas pains, they wear two different pairs of glasses to read letters, and when that is not enough, they read only the headlines in the newspaper and then guess about the articles, and this makes their world more and more the product of their fancy, as perhaps it should be, because after that comes the moment when nothing matters, and the only thing left for the puppeteer to do is release the string that holds the funeral plaque and watch the little puff of dust rise above the empty stage. The performance is over. The end. That is not what I meant to talk about, but rather about something still far from over. The walls of the stairwell in the building where I lived were covered in splotches of different colors, irregular shapes, which my neighbors were using to try and cover the large and small swastikas, the six-pointed stars that dripped with gore, and the brief anti-Semitic slogan, if anti-Semitic best describes it: BOO TO THE JEWS. The messages in my mailbox had become so frequent and monotonous that I stopped saving them. One night, I found a little mound of excrement on the doormat. I bent over, then knelt down to examine it more closely. It was firm, compact, and I could just picture the effort with which the person had squeezed it out. Perhaps the squeezing was even accompanied by pain, the rupturing of a blood vessel along the rim of the anus, but the light in the stairwell was too weak for me to spot any traces of coagulated blood. Judging by the position of the stool, tidily coiled, the person had produced it while crouching over the doormat, and someone else, I assume, was keeping watch at the door to the building. If they had brought it there from somewhere else, surely the natural snakelike appearance would have been spoiled, at least smeared. I was not eager to carry it, so I picked up the doormat along with it and tossed them both into a large plastic shopping bag with the name of a fashion shop written across it. I bought a new doormat with the word WELCOME on it, but when I found it a few days later soaked in urine I gave up on any further purchases. So, maybe this was a victory for the monster, as Marko put it, and I believe that they experienced it as such; however, I would do better, I answered, spending my money on more useful things. I can always wipe my shoes, I added, on my neighbor's mat, nothing wrong with that. If I was being exposed to such things, then, I reasoned, the real Jews surely must have been suffering far greater abuse. Strangely, Jaša Alkalaj and Isak Levi had not known of any such incidents, or maybe, as Marko claimed, they preferred not to talk about them. Fear is the greatest censor, said Marko. I hadn't seen Jakov Švarc much at that point, but when I ran into him by chance on Knez Mihailova Street I brought the matter up. As I leaned toward him to hear better in the clamor and bustle of the street, I spotted two familiar figures by the entrance to a passageway that led through to Čika Ljubina Street. I could not recall at first where I knew their faces from, but then, as strains of an accordion wafted from somewhere, I recalled the rainy night when they accosted me at the doorway to my building. One of them, in the nursery school bushes, had punched me in the small of my back, right in the kidneys. The other had changed some, his hair had grown out or he had grown a mustache, but there was no doubt that he too had been breathing down my neck. Do you now understand, asked Jakov Švarc, why this is as it is? I looked at his lips, as if there were words on them that I had not yet heard. I noticed only a crumb of bread. It might get better someday, he went on, meanwhile, it is what it is. He had, he said, an appointment with a cardiologist, at his age, he said, every twitch was interpreted as announcing the ultimate absence of all pain. He patted himself on the chest, in the area of the heart, and left, and I looked again at the entrance to the passageway. There was no one there. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, I turned and kept walking toward Kalemegdan, spinning like a mindless weathervane. I had similar experiences over the next few days, not every day, of course, though often enough to make me anxious about going out into the street. The sequence of events was nearly always the same: here and there, alone or in company, I would spot the familiar faces, unobtrusive yet present, and the moment I was distracted they would slip away. Ignore them, Jaša Alkalaj said when I complained, they are spoiled rotten and have seen too many bad movies. I didn't believe him, sensing that he didn't believe himself. When I asked what was really going on in the Jewish community, he avoided answering, and when I said rumors were circulating around town that the Jewish cemetery had been vandalized, he said that I shouldn't believe everything I heard, but if I was so curious I could go to the cemetery and see for myself. The dead don't lie, you know, he said. So off I went to the cemetery. The metal gateway was freshly painted. I opened it with effort, stepped into the cemetery, and let it shut with a bang behind me. After all the noise and commotion of the traffic, the serenity of the cemetery was almost painful. The broad avenue, lined with evergreens, led to a large monument resembling the wings of a butterfly, or, more precisely, a gateway to heaven, a gate to the other world. The day was bright and warm, the path crisscrossed with shadows. I walked slowly, pausing, studying tombstones, but I couldn't shake off the sense that someone was watching me. Maybe that's how it is at every cemetery, what with the presence of all the dead and the feel of silence, but, just in case, I turned around abruptly several times, once I even crouched, determined to wait for the person to appear. No one appeared. I crouched until my calves and thighs ached, and then I straightened up with great effort and sat on the nearest bench. Though the avenue was not long, the winged monument looked as if it were far off on the horizon, as if I would never reach it. Then, suddenly, the branches of a pine tree above me began swaying, though I felt not a breath of wind. Two or three pine needles floated past me, and one, like an arrow, pierced the sleeve of my jacket, shivered, then tipped over. I looked up. There was still rustling, but now it came from the very top of the tree. That must be how the dead make themselves known, I thought. I no longer looked back. I lowered my head and hurried toward the monument. I wanted to get out of that tunnel of evergreens as fast as possible, to get to a place where no one was saying anything to me. I came out of the shadows and thought I saw someone pass behind the monument wings: he stepped from behind the right-hand wing and slipped behind the one on the left. I froze. I stood on the concrete path at the approach to the monument, staring at the empty space between the wings. Maybe those are the wings of an angel, I thought, but this did nothing to ease my terror. Only one possibility was left, and slowly, step by step, I walked along the path that led through the monument. I held my breath and listened. The only sound I could hear was the pounding of blood in my ears. Then I squinted and nearly galloped across the empty space on the path, shielding my head with my arms and kicking my feet up high. When I opened my eyes I was face to face with the cemetery wall. I turned around. Between the wings of the monument I could see the iron gate at the opposite end of the path. The pounding in my ears subsided, but my heart was beating furiously. There was nothing more stupid I could have done, I thought, than come to the cemetery and display my helplessness. I moved slowly among the tombstones. Some were standing at a slant, some eroded with age, but nowhere did I see any smashed stones or scribbled graffiti. In one corner I did see discarded hypodermic needles and wrinkled condoms, the sort of thing that can be found at any cemetery, and they did not seem to have any particularly anti-Semitic message to convey. I walked through another section and then came back to the shady avenue. There, by a modest fountain from which water was dripping, my attention was drawn to a monument in the shape of a pile of books. I leaned over to take a closer look and noticed that one part of the gravestone was lighter, as if it had recently been washed or scrubbed with a powerful cleanser. I crouched down and despite the best efforts of the person who had tried to scrub away the unwanted message, I was able to decipher the words DEATH TO THE JEWS. Instead of an exclamation point following the words there was an odd mark, probably someone's unsuccessful attempt at signing the message. I straightened up and wiped the sweat off my forehead. Why hadn't Jaša Alkalaj simply confirmed the story about the vandalizing of the cemetery, but instead sent me to see for myself? The dead do not lie, he'd said, and indeed, the dead did not lie. They also told the truth in the section of the cemetery near the entrance gate. Three tombstones were lying on the ground, all three smashed to pieces, and it was clear, though the pieces were laid out on boards as if awaiting repair, that an unnatural force had caused them to fall and break. Three tombstones do not topple on their own. I rinsed my hands at the fountain, shook them dry, and wiped them with a handkerchief. It took even more effort to open the gate from the inside, and as I pulled at the large iron handle, I was wondering whether someone might have locked it to shut me inside the cemetery, alone. Then the door creaked, budged, and when I pulled it to and stepped out into the street, a tram rumbled by. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, I looked every which way. In the days to come, as I said before, these motions preceded everything I did, and sometimes even today I look in every direction when I open the front door, though I am in a different city and no one is expecting me. Six years ago every gesture, every time someone broke suddenly into a dash, every word spoken loudly, to say nothing of whistles, all of it signified something entirely different from what that gesture, dash, or word seemed to mean on the surface. Never was reality farther from reality in Belgrade than during those years, and never was there greater insistence on the fact that this reality was the only true reality. And so I stood on the sidewalk, watched the tram trundling off into the distance, and strained to hear the murmur of the dead behind my back, and wondered how to fend off the aggressive flower hawkers who were striding my way. I never handled myself well in such situations, and usually I ended up buying everything they foisted on me. The only way to defend myself was to get away, so I turned in the opposite direction and moved quickly along the cemetery fence, but the hawkers also sped up, and their shouts reverberated in my ears, brief cries offering all kinds of flowers. Keep walking, a man said to me suddenly, as a woman shoved bouquets under my nose. When we come to the corner, continued the man, stop. I did. I stopped and said, What now? Now you buy the flowers, said the man. What you're looking for, said the woman, is in the bouquet. She lifted up the bouquet: carnations wrapped in damp paper. I asked, How much do they cost? The woman and the man looked at each other. Give what you want, the woman said finally. You wouldn't actually take his money, would you? asked the man. In case someone is watching, I interrupted, it must all look authentic. Fine, said the woman, then give me a piece of paper, give me anything. I dipped my hand into my pocket and pulled up a crumpled receipt for a registered mail package. The woman took it with the tips of her fingers, as if the paper were burning hot, dropped it into her pocket, and pushed the bouquet of flowers into my arms. They turned and walked to the cemetery gate, where other sellers were bustling with flowers and candles, and I stayed at the corner with the bouquet resting on my chest. And what, I later said to Marko, should I have done: gone back into the cemetery or kept walking, as if I had just decided this bouquet was for the living, not for the dead? Marko said he would have gone back, and he would not have neglected to see what was in the bouquet. A key, I answered, or actually, I added, a small plastic bag with a key in it. Good, said Marko, but for what? I'd like to know that too, I said. I showed him the key: an ordinary, smallish key of the kind used for a mailbox or a cupboard door. Marko was disappointed. He had been expecting a key to a safe, a key with an unusual mark on it, something to signal the complexity of any attempt at opening. If that's what the key looks like, he said, there is nothing of value hidden there. Shouldn't we first figure out what this key opens, I said, and then talk about what's there? You're right, said Marko, and suggested we smoke a joint of local grass. The grass, he claimed, was from Montenegro, and it had a nasty aftertaste and caused coughing, and that was the way it hit too: a sideswipe, slow, bitter. After some time, mostly spent staring at the ceiling, I wondered out loud how I would find the lock for the little key from the bouquet. Where do I start, I said, where should I look? Maybe there's something written on the little bag it was in, said Marko. It's a clear plastic bag, I said, there is nothing on it. Are you sure? asked Marko, sometimes it is hardest to see stuff that's in plain sight. I sighed, rose with effort, and weaving gently, went over to the wastepaper basket by my desk. When I knelt down, the entire room knelt with me, and when I bent my head to peer into the basket, I felt my brain touch my forehead on the inside. The basket was full of crumpled sheets of paper; the plastic bag was lying on top. I picked it up between my thumb and forefinger, and waved it triumphantly at Marko, and in that gesture toward Marko the bag was lit by a ray of light from the lamp by the sofa, and the letters KRSQ and the number 13 were clearly visible. I hadn't noticed them before because they weren't written with a ballpoint or a marker, but rather scratched on the inside surface of the bag with something sharp, perhaps the tip of a scalpel. Karađorđe Square, number 13, shouted Marko when I showed it to him. He suggested we go there immediately. He was shivering with excitement and some of the shivering affected me. I was barely able to tie my shoelaces, and my expression in the mirror wavered, as if I were shaking all over. Not bad, this Montenegrin stuff, said Marko as we stepped out into the street. He felt, he said, that he was trudging through layers of wool, that the soles of his feet never rested on solid ground. Maybe that is why it took us so long to walk to the high-rise. The entrance was dirty, buried in torn newspapers, plastic bags, and wrappers from wafer cookies and chocolate bars. The walls were scrawled with messages and scribbles. The mailboxes were on the right-hand side, many were broken open, some scorched with fire, some painted in different colors. Marko looked for box 13, but it was wide open and the door was dangling on a half-broken hinge. Someone beat us to it, said Marko, and I could do nothing but agree. Who knows how long we'd have stood there, alert to the despair we were feeling, had I not raised my eyes again to the mailboxes and studied them carefully until we found the one that had the right kind of lock. It was number 22, and the little key slid in smoothly, with no resistance. In the back of the opened box lay another key. This time there could be no doubt: unlike the first, the second key was clearly for unlocking and locking the door to an apartment. I looked at Marko and he nodded. Just in case, we went back to the front door and surveyed the area. We decided the apartment was on the fourth or fifth floor and Marko suggested we take the elevator, but I insisted we walk up, claiming that additional caution was not a bad idea and that the elevator might be more dangerous. Marko relented, though he did it because of a woman who had just entered the building, not because of me. We climbed quickly, skipping two or three steps at a time, and when we stopped on the fourth floor, we were both out of breath. Leaning against the banister, we waited to catch our breath and then went to the door with the number 22 on it. I looked at Marko; he nodded again. I put the key in the lock, turned it once, once more, and turned the knob gingerly. The door swung open to a dark front hall. Marko went in first, I followed. I closed the door, leaned on it, and wiped the sweat from my forehead. You entered an apartment when the owner wasn't home after all, said Marko, not hiding his sarcasm, as he felt the wall by the door in search of the light switch. He flicked it, and, with a crack that echoed like the sound of a rifle shot, light poured into the front hall. Our faces were reflected in an oval mirror. The two doors that led farther into the apartment were shut. One of them, the first one we opened, was the door to the kitchen, spotlessly clean and tidy, as if no one ever used it. Marko went over to the refrigerator and pulled open the door: empty. We stood a little longer before the open fridge and stared into its interior as if it held the answer to all our questions. Marko shut the refrigerator, we returned to the front hall and opened the other door. That led into the dining room, which gave access to two other rooms. However, at the doorway to the dining room we were startled by what we saw: all the walls, from floor to ceiling, were covered with shelves crammed with books. There were books on the fl oor stacked in uncertain, wobbly piles. The same was true in the other rooms: shelves with books, nothing else. In the larger room were a small desk and an office chair with a seat that swiveled, that was all. Incredible, said Marko, just like that novel about the man who lived in an apartment full of books. He couldn't remember what novel, nor could he recall the writer's name, but he knew that it all ended in a big blaze, a fire that mercilessly devoured the books. I also didn't know which novel he had in mind, though for me, I said, the scene in the apartment evoked descriptions of the apartment where Salinger's heroes lived, the Glass family, or whatever their name was, they also had books lying all over the place, on the shelves, on chairs, the floor, even in the bathtub. It is always like that, said Marko, you put one book down somewhere, and two or three days later it's a pile, as if books get there by themselves. That had happened to him so many times, he said, that he decided to keep books in his apartment in only one place, otherwise, he said, they spread like mold, nothing can hold them back. You shouldn't compare books and mold, I said, but Marko rebelled, asserting that there are good molds and that everything that gets moldy needn't be thrown away. We were standing in the dining room again, not knowing what to do next. I didn't want to talk anymore about molds. Marko went over to the desk and looked into a side compartment, then he slid open one of the two drawers. There is nothing here, he said almost gruffly, then pulled open the second drawer and found an envelope with my name on it. I took the envelope and sniffed. I don't know what I was expecting, but it didn't smell like anything in particular, though I was convinced that my name had been written by Margareta, whose fragrance I would have recognized. Marko insisted that I open it immediately. I refused. He was startled, he pressed his lips together, said nothing. My refusal surprised me too, though I could have anticipated it after my decision not to tell him about the encounter with Margareta. Just as books attract other books, so confidences not shared attract other confidences not shared, and after the initial silence, others follow ever faster. Marko was, most certainly, my closest friend, someone whom I had known my entire life, but sometimes one should be cautious even with such friendships. In other words, there are moments when it is better to be alone, and I wanted such a moment for reading the letter from the desk. Marko made a last stab at changing my mind and offered me a joint, which he pulled out of his shirt pocket. A little more of the Montenegrin stuff, he said, and everything will be different. No, I said, and added that he should not be smoking grass in a strange apartment in which there were no ashtrays and someone might show up at any moment. Marko lit the joint anyway, and I went to the kitchen and opened a window. The kitchen looked out on the Danube and the path that stretched to Hotel Yugoslavia, and which, probably because of the clouds that had gathered over Belgrade, was almost deserted. Not far from the high-rise several boys were playing soccer. I heard Marko whistling behind my back, then a chair creaked and he coughed. Then I noticed that on a grassy slope by the hotel, where pillars were left standing from the old Zemun railway station, a group of people had gathered in an uneven, jagged circle, or so it looked from where I stood, and they were listening to a person who stood in the middle of the circle. Something is going on, I said, and called Marko over. Marko looked out at the scene on the slope, stubbed out the joint on the metal frame of the venetian blinds, and said that to him it looked like the meeting of some ecological party. No point, he said, in wasting our time. Besides, he went on, there's nothing for us to do here. At least for some of us, he added, and later, after we had left the high-rise, he said he had to run, said goodbye, and took off toward the center of Zemun at a fast clip. I watched him walk away and suddenly found myself thinking he was leaving forever. The thought was so awful that I nearly ran after him. Instead I called out his name. He didn't hear me, or pretended not to, and continued walking, zigging and zagging among the pedestrians and parked cars until I lost sight of him. I touched the pocket where the folded letter was. The paper rustled soothingly. I thought I ought to read it, I even started reaching into the pocket, but then I turned and headed toward the hill by the hotel. I walked past the boys playing soccer and cursing. A little dog was tied to a lamppost serving as the goalpost, and the dog whined and wagged its tail each time the ball flew by. I came out on the path and walked by a kiosk selling food and juices. The fragrance of frying fish wafted my way. Two pregnant women walked slowly by, holding hands. One mentioned theЧитать дальше