David Albahari - Leeches

Minut editorial office to deliver my article, which meant heading the other way, since the Minut office was in the center of Belgrade, but I saw nothing wrong with that, in fact it seemed to be in sync with what the triangles were suggesting. You must be mad, I said to myself in the mirror as I was shaving, otherwise why would you believe in something that has no meaning? Because nothing can exist with no meaning, I shouted over the buzz of the electric shaver, and because everything speaks to us, it's just that we are not skilled enough to hear and understand. The face in the mirror shook its head but said nothing. I rubbed my face with lotion, combed my hair, licked my lips. I picked up the envelope with the article in it, slammed the door behind me, shoved my keys into my pocket, and dashed down the stairs. In the crowded bus I remembered that I had not given the piece a title, but pressed from all sides, surrounded by unpleasant smells and the stench of sweat, I couldn't come up with one. Fear of Water, said the editor after he'd read the piece, there's no better title. I didn't like it personally, but I kept my mouth shut. You're getting back into form, said the editor, keep this up, and feathers will fly. I had no idea what he meant, and I hoped he was not expecting me to write about a chicken farm. Of course the grim reality in which we were living didn't give me much leeway. Today a river and the river mud, tomorrow chickens and slippery chicken shit, the day after tomorrow who knew, but as long as it was possible to write about something, and as long as Minut was willing to print what I wrote, there could be no giving up or complaining. I left the editor and went over to the accounting office. Mirjana, in Payments, was waiting for me with cash. I signed for the money, kissed her on both cheeks to the giggles of her office mates, and hurried off to the Zeleni Venac bus stop and the buses that ran to New Belgrade. The railway line no longer ran between Zemun and New Belgrade, but I knew which high-rises the person who met Dragan Mišović from time to time had meant. The minute I got to the first building I had a problem: the light in the stairwell was out, and the tenant list was hung up high on the wall above the mailboxes, lit by a feeble light that shone wanly through the glass front door, impossible to read. I had to go to the nearest newspaper kiosk to buy a box of matches, then, striking match after match, I studied the handwritten list of names. There was not a single Mišović among them. In the next high-rise the light was working but there was no tenant list. I had to climb all the way up to the top floor, the sixteenth, if I counted them correctly, reading the names on all the doors. Some of the doors, on the third, fifth, and eleventh floors, had no nameplate, so I had to ring the doorbell and ask whether a Mr. Mišović lived there. He didn't live behind any of those doors, nor did he live in the makeshift apartment at the top of the building, adapted from rooms designed for communal use. There was a family by the name of Mišović; in the third high-rise, but no Dragan among them. I rang their doorbell, just in case. A boy, about ten years old, opened the door, and when he heard my question, went to ask his mother, then returned with the news that Grandpa Dragoslav was away in Montenegro. Impossible, I said, but the boy had already shut the door. There was one more building that met the loose description offered to me, but after the possibility that Dragan Mišović; might have moved to Montenegro, if he was indeed the grandfather the boy had referred to, I wondered whether there was any point in going into the third building. In I went, nevertheless, driven by the urge to be systematic in everything I did, which compels me to line up the books on my shelves in alphabetical order and arrange the plastic bags, cans, and glass jars by size. None of the other entranceways had been clean, but this last one was sickeningly filthy. Heaps of trash carpeted the floor, old newspapers were piled in the corner, cigarette butts strewn everywhere. The stench of urine hung over it all like a thick curtain. Despite the state of the entranceway, there was a framed list on the wall with the names of the people who lived there, and on it, as I struggled to hold my breath, I found the name I was looking for. Dragan Mišović lived on the eighth floor, in apartment number 42. I pushed the button to summon the elevator, but it didn't appear even after several minutes had gone by, so I started up the stairs. When I had made it to the sixth floor, I heard the clang of the metal elevator door slamming shut a floor or two above, and the lit elevator cabin shot by me, hurtling toward the ground floor. For an instant, through the translucent glass, I caught sight of a dark silhouette. I couldn't be sure whether the person was a woman or a man, but I was certain that he or she was wearing a cap. Not until I'd made it to the door of apartment number 42 did it occur to me that perhaps the person in the elevator had been Dragan Mišović. If he wore the same coat winter and summer, why wouldn't he be wearing a cap on this balmy March day? It was too late, of course, for me to race down after the elevator, though I could have called it and checked whether I could detect a lingering whiff of mint. I pressed the doorbell and it announced: Ding-dong. I rang again, waited a little longer, though I knew I was waiting in vain, and then slowly, gripping the banister, I headed downstairs. About halfway down, on the fourth or third floor, the elevator passed me on its way up, dark and empty. So it goes in life, I said to the person who had run into Dragan Mišović; from time to time, while some are on their way down, others are on their way up. I was thinking of the woman clambering up the muddy bank to the paved promenade, but this I didn't say out loud. There are some things we can always rely on, the person said, adding she was especially gratified to hear that since she had moved to Banovo Brdo nothing had changed in the vicinity of the former underpass. Now at least she knew that she could go back there any time if it turned out she didn't like life in Banovo Brdo, because there was nothing worse than going off somewhere and then, once you had decided, for whatever reason, that you wanted to go back, finding that the place you had left behind was no longer the same place that you had, in symbolic terms, taken with you. Did Dragan Mišović;, I asked the person, wear a cap, and if he did, exactly what kind of a cap was it? The person said nothing. Hello, I said. No, answered the person. She didn't remember a cap, though she might well have been wrong and his coat might have so distracted her that it prevented her from registering other details. But the cap, I said, you had to have seen it, unless it was an invisibility cap, in which case the whole person would have been invisible, the coat would have been walking by itself. But that is just how it looked, said the person, because the coat was so oversized it nearly reached the ground, and when Dragan turned up the collar and pulled his arms into the sleeves, it really looked as if the coat were walking by itself. One should keep in mind, said the person, that Zemun is a damp place, and dense fogs are not uncommon. And if Dragan Mišović was sensitive to the cold, and the person thought that he was, though she didn't say why, then he withdrew into that coat as a turtle did into its shell. Didn't I remember, the person asked, how Dragan was always closing the windows in our classroom, even after the teacher had opened them? As soon as the teacher turned around, the person went on, Dragan would sneak over to the window and close it, which would, of course, have all of us in stitches. I didn't remember that, the part about the windows or the part about the stitches, but I didn't let on, just as I didn't know why I'd called this person again and told her how my search for our schoolmate had turned out. My guess is that I simply wanted to talk to someone, and no one else came to mind. Should I ever run into Dragan Mišović;, the person said, I must certainly give him her regards, though he might not remember her. Sure, I said, and then I wrote a letter in which I asked Dragan Mišović; to take a look at the enclosed geometric figure and tell me if anything was hiding in that arrangement of a circle, triangles, and the pieces shaped like apple slices. I rang his doorbell at nine o'clock the next morning. No response. I leaned my ear against the door and listened. I couldn't hear anything. I rang again, knelt, and tried to slip my letter under the door. I couldn't. I had to toss it into his mailbox, downstairs, at the entranceway, though I'd wanted to avoid doing that not only because of the filth and nauseating stench of urine but also because I was afraid that someone might pull it out of the half-smashed mailbox, and that the letter might get into the hands of someone other than the person for whom it was intended. When we don't have much of a choice, I said in passing to a little boy who was calling to his mother in a squeaky voice, the choice we do have is a good one. The boy fell silent for a moment, then stuck his tongue out at me and fled into the building. His tongue was blue, as if he'd been sucking on a hard blue candy. I walked between several buildings and came out on Radoja Dakiča Street, which ultimately led me to the Zemun park, and from there, walking by the high school and the Air Force Center, to the main street. I decided to retrace the streets I had walked the day before. I turned from the main street onto Karamatina. As had been the case earlier, I had no notion of what I was looking for, not counting the geometric figure under the button. I looked everywhere, scanned the walls, curtains, and shutters, wooden and glass doors, and carefully moved aside the crumpled sheets of newspaper or cigarette wrappings on the sidewalk. When I reached the quay, I turned right onto Zmaj Jovina. At the corner, where I had found, and left, the black button, I could see nothing, not even when I knelt close to the pavement. I went down the street and soon I could hear the noises of the market. There was more litter along this street, so I moved slowly, looking carefully around, yet it was by chance that I discovered a new lead. While I was preoccupied, head bowed, with a mess of cigarette butts, I bumped into a woman, who in the collision dropped her shopping bag, full of vegetables and fruit. Potatoes and bananas littered the sidewalk. I knelt to pick them up and, on a step leading to a building painted yellow, I saw the familiar sign. I handed the woman her bag, apologized once again, and when she moved down the street I crouched by the stairs. There could be no doubt. It was that same combination of a circle and triangles. The symbol was drawn on the first of three steps leading to a tall double door. I tried the knob: the door was locked. I knocked, the door didn't open. How many more doors were there going to be like this one? I stepped back and checked out the windows. There was nothing visible through the curtains, which didn't lessen the chance that someone inside might easily be able to see what was happening outside. I continued toward the market, the main street, and the theater, passed a hairdressing salon, a fabric store, a bookstore, and a display window full of souvenirs, and then, when I was least expecting it, I caught sight again of the geometric figure. I was standing for a minute, studying a poster on a large wooden gate, a poster advertising a beginner's course in tai chi, and when I came close to it, I saw that the circular sign, which from farther off I had taken to be the black-and-white Taoist symbol for yin and yang, was in fact the design of the circle and triangles. First mathematics, and now Eastern meditation through movement, who knew where this sign would take me next? The big gate was not locked, I pushed it and stepped into a dark passageway leading to a small courtyard with a bench, two flowerpots with barberry plants, and a water pump. I couldn't remember when I'd last seen an old-fashioned pump like this, with a long handle, and I stared at it as if I had just arrived in a spaceship from another planet. I circled around the pump cautiously, first in one direction, then in the other. Someone watching would probably have thought we looked like a hunter and his prey, though when I looked up, it turned out no one could have seen us. None of the walls facing the courtyard had windows. The courtyard was tucked in behind a building that faced the street. I went over to the bench and sat down, and silence instantly settled around me. I saw every inch of the barberry bush down to the finest detail, as if I were studying it through a microscope, and the gently curving line of the pump handle was so precise that it looked as if it were fashioned from pure radiance. I didn't breathe, or I thought I was not breathing, my heart was beating softly, as if not to disrupt the stillness. I looked up and the surrounding walls seemed to have suddenly lengthened, nor could I see where they ended, though the piece of sky arching over them was still recognizably blue. I shut my eyes. Someone was playing a musical instrument, not in one of the buildings but far away, yet the notes reached me, and somehow I knew they were intended for me alone. The moment I opened my eyes, the music stopped. The glow above the pump slowly faded, my heart began to pound again, my temples throbbed. When I stood up, my knees buckled. I don't know how that could have happened, I said to Marko that evening. We were sitting in his kitchen, listening to Get Up with It, a double album Miles Davis recorded between 1970 and 1974, and passing a joint back and forth, a joint of marijuana that Marko had grown the year before near his vacation house in Slankamen. Sounds to me, Marko said, as if you had dropped acid and tripped. Nonsense, I answered, and took a drag, it had nothing to do with earthly things, it felt like ascent and submersion at the same time, like being in two places at once. You're losing it, said Marko, maybe you should stop smoking. He passed me the joint, but I shook my head. There is something strange here, I said, I don't know what, but I'm getting a bad feeling. Like I said, Marko laughed, give it up. He stubbed the joint out in the ashtray. That's not what I meant, I went on, I meant everything that happened, the geometric figure, the way it kept cropping up, my search. Marko said nothing. You know, I asked, what I was thinking before I came to see you? How could I? Marko replied. You're the mystic here, not me. I was thinking, I said, that the man deliberately slapped the woman so I'd see it and go after her, follow her. How could he know that, Marko protested, I mean it's not as if you're famous for taking off after injured parties whenever you witness a violent act to, I don't know, I guess, hold their hand. Hey, tell me, he continued, how many times have you done anything like that in your life? This was a first, I answered. Exactly my point, said Marko, so, no matter what you thought, this didn't happen just so someone could lure you into something, and, by the way, you don't even know what that something is. Maybe this is for starters, I answered, maybe I'll only figure out later what's going on, but Marko didn't want to talk about it anymore. He rolled another joint, put the record on again, and talked about how Miles Davis had made the recording. I didn't listen, I was floating on the waves of the homegrown cannabis, and, somewhere inside me, I was back at the scene by the Danube. Something was not quite right: was it the impact of the blow, the movement of the hand delivering the slap and the woman's behavior afterward, the way she staggered and sloshed into the water? They were not in sync; it was as if something else had been agreed upon, as if the man was supposed to hit her harder, and when the moment came, he hit her differently, and the woman, not expecting it, hadn't had the time to adjust and instead reacted the way they had agreed she would react, as if she had genuinely lost her balance from the blow and nearly fallen into the shallows. What about the man in the black trench coat? Why would he disappear so quickly, unless something had gone wrong, different from what they had planned? I didn't mention the man in the black trench coat to Marko, or he would have been truly convinced I had lost my mind. People who buy into conspiracy theories, Marko had told me many times, have a void in their head they don't know what to do with, so they fill it with junk, and sooner or later, they become victims of sketchy plots, secret organizations with one goal only: to drag that person into something that promises to undermine the very foundations of the world. It was here that I caught on to the sound thread of Miles Davis's trumpet and stopped thinking. Had I been home, I would have fallen asleep, but here, at Marko's, I had to struggle to stay on the surface. I stood up and slowly, as if walking under water, got ready to leave. Marko offered me a bed, which I declined. A challenge is better than surrender, I said. Besides, he didn't live far from me, only three blocks of buildings between us and a small park behind the elementary school, but when I got home I was exhausted, as if I had walked fifteen miles. I will not fall asleep, I thought, massaging my calves, but when I woke up the next morning, it was no longer morning, but noon. I put on water for coffee and dashed out to buy fresh bread and a paper. When I came back from the store, I saw something white in the mailbox. I unlocked it and took out a letter with my name written on it in Cyrillic script on the front, and Dragan Mišović written in Latin script on the back. Only a few minutes earlier, when I came down the stairs, I could have sworn there'd been nothing in the mailbox, and so I raced out into the street, looked to the left, looked to the right, no pedestrians in long winter coats, just one kid wearing a baseball cap, but cap or no cap he was not the person I was looking for. I went back up to the apartment, poured the water into the coffeepot, and made my coffee. Though I was dying to know what was in the letter, I first leafed through the newspaper, perused the articles in the crime section, scanned the cultural listings, and tried to solve the chess problem off the top of my head, without the key. I didn't succeed, though it looked so easy at first glance, but whatever I tried, a solution that saved the black pieces kept coming up, and my bishop was more trouble than help. I put aside the paper and reached for the letter. Once again I inspected my name on the front of the envelope and the name of the sender on the back. The letters were obviously written by the same hand, but why one name, mine, was in Cyrillic, and the other in Latin, I will probably never know. I didn't have the patience to slice carefully through the top of the envelope, so I poked my finger in and ripped it open with a single motion. Unlike our two names, the letter was written on a computer, in Latin script, and printed out on a quality printer. I don't know what this is about, the letter began, but I hope I won't be getting caught up in any more nonsense. What could possibly be hiding in such a simple geometric figure, the letter went on, except the futile desire to make reality different from what it is? Reality is reality, and no path can bring one to its other side, where everything is supposed to be different, closer, I guess, to the truth. But that is something, the letter continued, of no interest to me, so I won't speak of it, for triangles and nothing but triangles are the order of the day; or, I should say, the order of the night, because it is night now. As far as the triangle is concerned there is no difference between day and night, of course, that should be obvious to anyone, but one never knows. People construe all sorts of things, even the possibility that within a triangle inscribed within a circle, or a triangle inserted into a triangle, there are answers to questions. A triangle is a triangle, and that's that. It is, however, true that triangular diagrams such as these, the letter continued, are connected to Möbius's barycentric coordinates, which play a role in the chemistry of color, but there is no additional meaning there that could enrich or facilitate an understanding of the figure (sloppily drawn, by the way). Far more interesting is that a very simple transformation of these coordinates gives what we call the Lamé coordinates. Lamé introduced them in his solution to the problem of the cooling of a prism with a base in the shape of an equilateral triangle, then he came upon the same problem in an analysis of the vibrations of an elastic membrane stretched taut over a triangle, and in the end he noticed that the same equation turned up in the description of an acoustic tunnel with soft walls. In brief, it is necessary to solve the eigenvalue problemЧитать дальше