A Handful of Sand E-Book

Marinko Koščec

• Herausgeber: Istros Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 402

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A Handful of Sand is a love story and an ode to lost opportunity. Now far from his homeland, the novel's protagonist looks back on his life, from his childhood, university days and first working experience to more intimate emotional events, making critical observations on human relationships and human existence. Interchanging with the chapters written in the narrator's voice are those narrated by a woman. As her story progresses, we realise that she is the love of his life: something that she hopes he will realise before it is too late. ''Croatia's foremost literary stylist, Marinko Koščec produces the kind of novels that combine crafted sentences and structural experiments without ever losing their storytelling drive'' TIMEOUT CROATIA This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Leseprobe

A Handful of Sand

Marinko Koščec

Translated from the Croation by Will Firth

Istros Books

Istros Books London, UKwww.istrosbooks.com

Copyright © 2013 Marinko Koščec Translation © 2013 Will Firth Artwork & Design@Roxana Stere, 2013

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-908236-88-3

The man had been absent for so long that he finally ceased to exist for the woman he had left The woman was so torn by that thought that the man finally really did cease to exist.

* * *

It’s snowing again; it must have started during that time where the night takes a break from its tormenting and delivers me to uniform blackness. You don’t hear it but you feel it behind the glass, and the noises from the street are softer, as if through cotton wool. The first bus came whining by at exactly five fifteen, picked up two frozen figures that embraced to maintain their uprightness despite the alcohol in them, snorted as if in disdain at such a modest morsel of humanity, and went grumbling off up Victoria Street. The rubbish containers were emptied at half past five. A snowplough went past, pushing the powdery snow from the road into piles which would later be taken away on trucks. Cars began to trickle by until they filled all four lanes heading for the inner city, like monstrous bees swarming in to drink at a source of poison; their humming would only gradually die away around midnight, together with the roar of the aeroplanes taking off and landing every fifteen minutes; so close that you can read the names of the airlines, one more exotic than the next.

It falls night and day. After an hour or two’s break it starts floating down again, calmly, thoroughly, only letting through enough sun to remind you it still exists. People say they can’t remember such a cold winter; when the temperature goes up to minus fifteen you feel like going out in short sleeves. I still haven’t seen the Canadian soil, that thin layer they conceive maps on, beneath the crust of snow. The lake is frozen up, too; last weekend I took a bus down Red River and went for a walk alongside it, though it could only be sensed beneath the monotony of the white, white plain thanks to the wild geese shifting from one end to the other, riveted by memories or because they couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. Smells, too, are imprisoned in the ice, everything is sterile, white and muted, like a cold room in which we, both geese and people, wait for our autopsy.

Every morning I wake up at five. A jolt, the beating of my heart, and then all I can do is stare into the same painful thoughts in the darkness; as soon as my conscious mind switches on, they’re there. For months they would at best recede a little to the demands of work, but never for an instant did they stop trampling me, digging away inside me and crushing me into ever smaller pieces. Yet things have improved since I arrived in Canada. My body has become hard and numb; when I’m stabbed, I’m able to smile. There’s nothing funny about it, but why not, we laugh. Why shouldn’t we have a beer and share a vulgar joke or two, ride on the underground, grill sausages, go to a museum or a strip-joint. Sure, I said, when Jeremy suggested we celebrate my birthday after I’d blabbed that I was born exactly thirty-three years before, to the day. He said that to please me, no doubt, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. Something told me he’d never seen a woman’s naked body before, let alone touched one. That just added to his mystical aura.

While I sit writing at the kitchen table, Jeremy lies in his room eternally immobile like a mummy, all two metres of him lying lifelessly on his back. He has fifteen minutes more until his alarm clock rings. If it was the weekend, he’d stay there till noon. I don’t know exactly what makes him a mystic, but I have no other name for the harmony which emanates from him, for the feeling that he’s achieved absolute equilibrium, plenitude and well-roundedness within his own body in a way known to him alone. At first glance you’d feel sad at the sight of him lying paralysed–this giant of a man made of nothing but muscle with a basilical frame and a blond ponytail down to his belt; the felling of a centennial oak is more heart-wrenching than when an ordinary plum tree hits the ground. But there’s no need for sadness; he’s completely at peace with himself, smiles back at every glance, both at home and at work. Never once have I see him ruffled or heard him raise his voice. As conscientious as he is contented, as if it were exactly the way to attain nirvana, he demolishes walls with a jackhammer. At breakfast he stirs oatmeal in a pot until it turns to porridge, then he meditates over every spoonful. He answers questions gently and benignly and never asks any himself. Nor do I; he could hardly have found a more compatible flatmate. I don’t bring home visitors, I’m not loud, in fact I hardly make any noise at all, but here I am, without a doubt – at least physically. And he lets me know in his discreet way that he notices and appreciates that.

Saturday the twenty-ninth of December: frying-pan hamburgers and pre-made chips with sachets of free ketchup, then an odyssey into the Winnipeg night in Jeremy’s rattly Chevrolet through the cosmopolitan quarter which has grown up near the airport, a labyrinth of fifteen-storey buildings with subsidised rents. And on through the tunnel formed by the aluminium monsters lining the road, or rather their outlines which faded away beneath neon aureoles and columns of thick smoke, and then through the ice-sheathed wasteland. And at the end a low, log cabin with the sign Nude Inn, adorned outside and in with long lines of little twinkling lights bulbs for the New Year. Here Jeremy and I celebrated my birthday and alternated in buying each other beers. He got the first round, then me, and then it was take turns once more. Each time we said cheers, exchanged significant glances, and in between were mostly silent. He looked towards the stage, but the expression on his face made you think of a rippling mountain stream and a fawn drinking from it. The girls performed their acts, alone or in pairs, wrapping themselves around metal bars or one another and demonstrating ever greater gymnastic prowess. In the break he said something in my ear, but the music was too loud and I was too tired. On the way back he added that we’d had an excellent table, and I agreed.

The next day, and that was the only time, he told me a few words about himself, with the same softness in his voice and the same impassive smile. He’d recently moved here from a small town fifty miles further north after the firm he’d worked for went bankrupt and the aunt he’d grown up with died, as well as his twin brother. His aunt never married; she’d developed multiple sclerosis long ago and been immobile for the last twelve years of her life. His mother had been taken away when he was five by the hand of his father–or an axe, to be precise. He’d never seen his father sober. After prison, he saw his son now and again in the house of the widow with whom he started a new life, but he soon lost that too, in a fire caused by smoking drunk in bed. And his brother had died just last year when a hunting rifle blew up in his face. Jeremy liked it here in Winnipeg and was completely happy with his job.

I went out before lunch, into the flaying cold. After fifteen minutes of rocking from foot to foot, the train arrived empty. The doors opened and closed pointlessly at the stations until the train dipped underground, signalling its approach to the city centre. A handful of people got in, muffled from head to toe, and rushed to huddle up on one of the heated seats. I got out at Yong Street. There were still a few shops open in Chinatown. Steam emerged from a bakery, through cracks in the dilapidated windows. I went in and bought a bag of crab and pineapple crackers from a shrimp of a man who didn’t stop thanking me even after I’d left; waving to me once more through the bedewed window pane. The only thing I remember about that afternoon is that I spent some time leafing through books in the subterranean shopping mall which had sunk into apathy after the fever of Christmas, although neon promises were still blinking that all our wishes would come true in 2006.

The day dragged on until it was finally time for dinner. A handwritten board solicited me with Taiwanese delicacies at a special season’s discount. The restaurant was at the bottom of the court, squeezed in between a flower shop and an undertaker’s. A reception desk almost as high as me rose up immediately inside the premises, with a hotel bell which you had to ring for service. A frighteningly broad female face appeared and observed me from below for several seconds over the desk; for a moment I thought it was a gimmick–a carnival mask they put on as a welcome. Eat one person, she said with an intonation probably supposed to indicate a question, descended from her throne and beckoned with her finger for me to follow her into an empty hall. Where exactly to seat me still demanded some thought; she took me to a table in one of the compartments for couples behind a sumptuous screen of plywood embellished with a jungle of imitation carved tendrils of vibrant red, green and gold. The whole place was smothered in vivid opulence, gold paint and plastic. Every table was dominated by a bouquet of artificial flowers. Imitation candlesticks and a plethora of Oriental abstract art hung from the pink-painted walls, while polychromatic paper dragons with protruding tongues dangled from the ceiling, or rather from the canopies hanging low over my head. As a counterpoint to that colourful exaltation, a bloodless female voice oozed from the loudspeaker for the duration of my stay in the establishment. It was so dirgeful that even the carpet would have started to cry if it understood Taiwanese, and was accompanied contrastingly by a rather irritating piano, which at times sounded like a French chanson, at others like a salsa. A piercing hum sporadically drowned out the music.

This went on and on, and my food still hadn’t been served. But the smell of frying issued from the kitchen, heavy and abundant, and the hasty rattle of utensils intimated that a large family was rushing to serve a sudden throng of guests, although not another soul turned up the whole time I was eating. Still, the proprietress finally brought me the clams I had ordered and ceremoniously presented them together with a bowl of rice and a bottle of tap water. They tasted like pork. Not eat much she commented when returning the change, as concerned as she was disappointed. I replied with my best imitation of a Taiwanese smile and bow.

For all the abundance of Winnipeg’s gastronomic attractions, there is none I’ve visited a second time. Yesterday, at a Japanese restaurant, the decor was exactly the opposite: rectangular and austere, with reproachfully clean lines and a minimum of colour, pale yellow and black; the lighting was subtle, attenuated by rice-paper screens; and there was no music. The owner, his wife, and two boys, evidently their sons, stood in line at the entrance. All of them, one after another, called on me while I was eating to ask Everything OK? or to fill up my water glass. I ruminated on their credo engraved in a little plaque in the restroom: Who comes as a friend, always comes too late and leaves too early. I have always firmly believed in a friendly attitude, and it was with such that I went to see them; yet this adage informed us that every hope is futile–it’s always too late, if not too early.

At the table next to me, two Japanese businessmen were conversing quietly between mouthfuls. They understood each other perfectly, after just a syllable or two; as soon as one started to speak the other would nod, and they filled in the pauses by both nodding. The men were restrained, their manners refined, and they fitted flawlessly into the setting. But during the course of dinner they gradually shed their veneer; a second bottle saw their jackets thrown over the backs of the chairs, their tie-knots loosened, and the ties then rolled up and pocketed; they talked ever more loudly, smiled from ear to ear, laughed spasmodically and wiped their sweat-beaded foreheads on the tablecloth. A group of Asian girls turned up from somewhere–teenagers, probably on an excursion. They clustered around five joined-together tables and immediately started chirping in a language the waiters didn’t understand, full of long ascending tones. Negotiations were conducted in slow and painful English: one of them interpreted for the others, translating the name of every dish on the menu, which led to lively debates. Finally, a huge shared platter arrived, noisily greeted with shouts and clapping, and was immediately attacked with cameras. They took snapshots of each other hugging or fraternising with glasses of water. Not one of them drank any alcohol, but they were soon seized by rapture and the place was inundated with a mood of collective inebriation. The businessmen were joined by the owner, pretty pickled himself, who started an exchange with one of them about something very funny; they burst out laughing together, slapping their thighs and showing all their teeth. The other businessman tittered with his head on the table as his eyes wandering off and he hummed to himself intermittently. All this proceeded quite naturally and anything could have happened; we were just a hair’s breadth away from all bursting into song together and dancing traditional dances on the tables as we welcomed fire-eaters and trapeze artists accompanied by giraffes.

The flirtatious glances the girls were casting my way, at first coy, became very open and inquisitive, accompanied by whispers and giggles. The atmosphere inspired me and I was tempted to move to their table, almost convinced that I would swiftly bridge the language barrier, racial and age differences, perhaps some distinctions in world view too, socialise freely with them all, and head off home with them arm in arm, wherever that may be.

But in the end I went outside: into the awful, crusty cold, amidst the snowflakes which were dancing again, this time in a horizontal danse macabre borne on a marrow-biting northerly wind, and I dragged my bag of bones slowly through the graveyard of ghostily extinguished glass-and-steel giants.

It’s not masochism which draws me to such restaurants. On the contrary, there’s usually a beneficial, liberating turn of events: my accumulated grief is stirred up, grows to unbearable satiety and bursts out in bouts of hysterical laughter, before morphing into a diabolical euphoria; this subsides into an ease which I take away with me, almost floating. In the hours that follow, everything is rinsed out of me, everything is gone. I’m damned wherever I am and whatever happens; I’d give my last piece of clothing if someone asked, or calmly watch my inner organs be excised.

And in the morning, on the dot of five, it starts all over again.

* * *

Exactly three weeks later they started jumping. There had only just been time for me to acclimatise and for the aggression of unfamiliar smells to stop. Time for the spirits of the former tenants to disperse–that residue of messy, broken lives; that concentrate of misery. And time for me to attain at least a fragile peace with this space, without any ambition to feel it would ever be mine.

The living room became my studio; there was a bathroom, a kitchen with a dining corner, and a tiny closet of a bedroom. And as much light as I needed, thanks to the generous windows: fortunately with bars. Call it paranoia if you like, but being alone in the basement flat, I was glad they were there. I soon learnt that dogs raised their legs at the windows, even those which were kept on a leash. I had always wanted to have a dog, or at least its bark. Like the yapping which the neighbour has to guard his flat, three or so floors up. The windows were also pissed on by beer-soaked football fans after every match, since the stadium was just one hundred metres away. They always came in groups and yowled their Dii-naa-mo or We are the champions, Croa-a-atia! There was a cramped parking area in front of the windows, and in the middle some of the tenants heroically maintained a little island of greenery with signs like Don’t kill the plants, God is watching you! Opposite there was a house which a religious community built for itself. They had evening gatherings several days a week, and also on weekends. You didn’t see the people arrive, you just heard the strains of a song, barely audible but borne by an ever greater chorus, and ever more imbued with His voice. When they really whooped it up, I opened the windows and fired back with industrial noise. Or with the folk singer Sigfriede Skunk, from her Satanistic phase which ended in her being put away in the loony-bin. That didn’t discourage the faithful vis-à-vis, but at least it struck a kind of balance in the sound waves. I also heard my upstairs neighbours very clearly whenever they had sex, or when they argued and started smashing the furniture. Once I tried to signal to them that my ears didn’t want anything to do with it by banging the broomstick on the ceiling. They took this as a wish to participate, as if I was flirtatiously egging them on, and replied with an identical tock-tock-tock before going on to groan even more heartily and fuck each other with a vengeance.

And then a lady threw herself off the twelfth floor. I was sitting on the windowsill with my millionth cigarette; without a thought, except perhaps for the warmth of the autumn night and the intensive quivering of the stars as I sieved the sky in vain, searching for the angel of sleep. All at once, behind my back I heard a sound like a breath of wind. I just managed to turn my head slightly, enough to glimpse an unnaturally twisted lower leg and a bare foot out of the corner of my eye. A split second later there came a thud, without an echo, as a heap of dead limbs hit the pavement and instantly pulped.

She’d been ill, they said: in the head and elsewhere, and old and lonely to boot. But why did I have to be part of her relieving herself of her suffering? Why did she have to spill it all five metres from my window?

Three months later it was the opening of my exhibition at the prestigious Gradec Gallery. On three levels, with TV coverage and the minister of culture in attendance, as well as all the significant acolytes of culture–twelve long years after my first exhibit in a suburban library. And there were flocks of tarted-up culture vulturettes, sighing and holding their hands to their hearts in front of the pictures and only able to stammer: It’s so… It’s so… Plus their strutting, parvenu husbands, square-headed and short-necked, who furtively noted the address with the intention of surprising their darling; their aesthetic interest was limited to the colours not clashing with the sofa. And then there were the perverts who merge with the crowd, unnoticed, but when they catch you alone in the studio there’s no getting rid of them. First they inquire circuitously about your techniques, about the meaning of this or that, discover cosmogonic connotations, make ever bolder allusions, and the whole time burn with only one desire: to unzip their flies and show you their jewels. The place was chock-full, but I spotted two or three other female artists discreetly letting themselves drift closer and closer to the curators and gallery owners, while looking anywhere but at the canvases. Quite indiscreetly, two male artists were ogling them with delight and a discerning thumb and forefinger on the chin, whispering into each other’s ears and bending double with laughter.

I trembled with fear, and also shame, under the spotlights and the shower of eulogies. Being presented like some kind of circus attraction, being photographed for people’s private albums, touched and felt, and having a dictaphone thrust into my mouth was OK, that was part of it all. But my pictures–I felt as if I was now seeing them for the first time. The gallery walls bore the marks of the mourning which I had painted out on canvases day and night, for months, unaware of what I was doing. Now it screamed from the walls, showing me strung up in a hundred copies. I felt that everyone there in the hall must have noticed, that every last person saw me as I saw myself before them: not just naked but flayed alive.

Yet the words praising my work gradually reached me and sank in, something about a ‘plunge into archetypical meanders’ and ‘the concatenated metamorphoses of points of departure’, about the paintings’ ‘psychogrammatic texture’ and the ‘intersecting of oneiric planes’, and it finally occurred to me how wrong I had been. There was nothing to be seen, either in me or the paintings. Now they belonged to the buyers, who could hang them wherever they liked. They were never mine anyway, but only passed through me. That brought relief; a huge burden left me, trickling away like sand through my fingers. At the same time, I rose up towards the ceiling and stayed there floating, invisible. I set off home, or towards what I had started to call home, in a stupor, even giggling a little. The bubbles of champagne converged to carry me down Vlaška and Maksimirska streets like on a cushion of air–even after I had noticed a commotion in front of the building, people wringing their hands and others running to the scene.

My reflexes always set in too late. Anyone with the slightest instinct of self-preservation would have interpreted the commotion as a warning to turn around and go back without delay. But I kept walking, hypnotised, until I found myself eye-to-eye, literally, with what I had first taken to be a football under one of the parked cars. Only after staring for an eternity did I realise that it was the most important piece of the woman who had thrown herself off the roof to land in front of my window with more precision that her precursor. As my new friend, the caretaker of the building, explained to me in detail, the woman’s head had caught on a first-floor clothes line, rolled away and been hidden from the people who found the rest of her. Until I arrived, they’d been sure this was an unheard-of murder by decapitation.

There was a curious watchfulness in that pair of eyes, something which long thereafter observed me timidly from the dark; now it’s with me to stay.

When I finally turned and went back the way I had come, back along Maksimirska and Vlaška, it was quite involuntary. Only at the intersection of Medveščak Street did I realise where I was going and comprehend that I had to spend the night at Father’s. I ended up staying three days. He was attentive, cooked for me and brought the food to my room. I only left it to go to the bathroom and spent the rest of the time curled up on the bed. That at least enlivened him for a while. After such a long time, he noticed that I existed.

On the third day, the landlady located me. She was full of comforting words but above all worried about how to find another tenant under these circumstances.

‘The caretaker has looked after everything,’ she assured me, ‘although she didn’t need to take responsibility. I paid her well.’

‘How do you mean take responsibility?’ I asked.

‘Don’t you know that you left your window open, so part of the unfortunate person, or rather what was inside…’

At that point I hung up.

It took me a lot of effort to imagine myself in that flat again. I could have asked someone to collect my things and store them somewhere for me; anywhere would do. But perhaps out of spite, or perhaps because it was hard to resist an opportunity to hurt myself, I returned. The woman who had taken on the unpleasant job had done her very best. She’d washed the curtains, polished the furniture and even ordered the cutlery in the drawers. But she was getting on in years, had a tremor, and the finger-thick lenses over her eyes prevented her from being particularly thorough. For days, I kept finding reminders of the event between the fins of the radiator, on my paintbrushes and even on the oil paintings I’d left to dry. I must admit, after the initial shock those stains and little relief-forming chunks fitted in very well on the canvases. The jumpers, who I’ll never know anything about (not that I want to) are sure to have had anything but that on their minds when they climbed up to the top of the building. But now they’ve become part of my art in a special way. That person deserves that their last traces be preserved, and at least they now hang in an ultra-swish dining room or the conference chamber of a big mobile-phone operator. In any case, their remains will serve to provide archetypes and oneiric points of departure for the art critics just as well as any stroke of my brush could.

That event served to bring me together with the caretaker, who lived on the second floor. In practice, our rapport was formed around her almost daily visits, carrying mushrooms picked on the slopes of Mount Sljeme. They were just about her only food, a fact she tried to conceal along with the other signs of abject poverty. She got up at dawn and walked all the way there and back to keep fit, she said. Her mushroom-picking was actually risky given her short-sightedness because a toadstool or two is sure to have ended up in her bag along with the edible ones. I can’t stand mushrooms: I feel that living off decay is already common enough in the human kingdom. But the first time I accepted them in the name of friendship, and after that I communicated with that one person in the building. She saw that as her good deed, an opportunity to take care of someone. She’d let me make her coffee but would never have anything else, even when she sat for hours through to late lunchtime, telling me episodes from her life–stories sadder than sad. Although she did repeat them all several times, with considerable variation on each occasion. Her younger and only brother, for example, drowned as a child while trying to save a friend who couldn’t swim, but the second time it was a lamb he wanted to save, and the third time round he was killed by the Ustashi, the Croatian Fascists. That makes your ear a little immune after a while. I didn’t want to risk disposing of the mushrooms in our rubbish container, so I wandered the neighbourhood with bags of fungus. I hadn’t yet found her rummaging through the bins, but the prospects were all too likely.

The title of caretaker helped her little in preventing a practical jokester from stealing the light bulbs on the ground floor as soon she replaced them. That, in conjunction with the front door’s eternally broken lock, turned my walk down the corridor to my basement flat in the evenings into fifteen seconds of panic. And it would do even less to prevent people in this part of Zagreb who wanted to commit suicide from thronging to our building, which was taller than the others, now that a pioneer had demonstrated how well it worked. In a flash of inspiration I stuck a note on the front door: To whom it may concern, the northern side is also good for suicide jumping. The next morning my friend just gave me a strange, mildly reproachful look. She was right, it was childish, so I took it down again.

* * *

For as long as I can remember I’ve been a magnet for weirdos, both for those who are kept at a safe distance with that label, as well as people who live among us peacefully and pose no danger until something in them erupts, for no apparent reason, and seem to need my proximity when it starts. It’s as if they recognise some kind of essential stimulus, like kindling needs a lighter; then afterwards they stop seeking me out and don’t approach me again for years, if at all.

It began with Jelenko. I met him on my first day at school and immediately realised, with an instinct for danger like that innate to small animals, that it would be best to avoid him. He stared in front of himself, as pale as a ghost, almost transparent, obviously asking himself what he’d done to deserve such terrible punishment, as if he was carrying the world he’d been thrust into on his shoulders. Over time, this ceased to be dramatic and diminished to a melancholic resignation, but his air of absence never went away. He emanated it like a saint wears a halo–an absence so real that it was visible to the even slightly sensitive eye, as irrefutable as the body of a normal person.

He did much better at school than all the others, but you could tell how little it mattered to him, and you could forget about the earthly application of whatever brilliance he had. Therefore he didn’t provoke any great envy or disappoint his parents’ ambitions: everyone sensed he was useless for any practical purposes and left him in peace.

Jelenko’s lyrical dimension, the ethereality of his being, was where we differed; I’m rooted in the ground and only achieved good marks with great effort. But I am able to listen, and from time to time he had to speak his mind; early in secondary school he started dropping in and meditating about suicide. I would listen carefully, in trepidation, neither agreeing nor attempting to dissuade him, aware of how much his argumentation set him apart him from the kind of teenagerish ravings which make the enigma of death enticing, of how far he was from those who hang themselves because of a bad report card, breaking up with their girlfriend or being fat. Simply put, it was as if he’d been born not into this life but into an adjacent plane, which by some freak of nature turned out to be a dead end, and as such it was all the same to him if he was to cut his life short or wait for it to end by itself; he always had one leg in the other world.

He could discuss death endlessly. These were actually dialogues with himself, because I had nothing to say on the topic. Death is something certain and eternal, everywhere and at all times; it’s damn hard to forget that but even today I don’t have anything to add. Maybe he came to me with his endless monologues because no one else took him seriously; but how can you dismiss someone when they show so much passion, when they only seem really alive when talking about death?

One year after the summer holidays we had to write about an event we remembered fondly. Jelenko, in a solemn and moving voice, with a wealth of poetic detail, described the burial of his rabbit and the dignity and reverence with which his whole family consigned the body of this beloved being to the earth. While he read, and for some time afterwards, the classroom was oppressed by heavy silence, and the relief was almost palpable when the teacher stopped him from reading on, without a word of commentary.

Still, the next day she suggested that he round off his composition with a story about the rabbit–about the feelings which had connected them and those which the loss of the rabbit aroused in him, with the aim of entering him in a national competition. Jelenko gave her an anxious look, but she persevered, thoroughly mistaking his reticence for modesty, until he shrugged his shoulders.

In the extended version, the rabbit was an exceptionally sweet creature, hungry for love and capable of returning it. It hopped freely around the house, stood up on its hind legs and held out its little paws wanting to be picked up and scratched on the tummy; it even ate from a dish at the dining table. An albino with red eyes, it seemed to be aware of its own uniqueness and was only waiting for the day when it would start speaking. There was a special bond between Jelenko and the rabbit: it would always wait for him at the door and knew when he was coming; whenever Jelenko was sad, even if he was out of the house, it would curl up in its cage, no longer caring to be stroked or given any attention, and would fill the house with sadness. The composition made no attempt to explain why the boy decided to kill the rabbit, be it as an experiment or because he was deranged; it was simply presented as a fact. But the description of the act was exhaustive: when it proved too much to do it with a knife, he took a knitting needle and loosed it from his slingshot. He had to do this several times, but the rabbit didn’t budge or utter a sound. It waited patiently, as if with relief, for its destiny. The description of the funeral ceremony which followed now appeared in a different light and no longer had much prospect in the competition.

After secondary school, Jelenko surprised everyone by deciding to become a priest. I personally think that, rather than ‘hearing the call’, he devised it as a way out–a ruse for avoiding both earth and heaven in a refuge halfway. In any case, he never got in touch with me after leaving for the seminary, and his family later moved away. I never saw him again.

Goran, by way of contrast, was every parent’s dream: delightfully undemanding but not autistic enough for the psychiatrists. The kind of child you want to pat on the head, one to be seen and not heard. You could give him a lollipop and he wouldn’t ask for anything else for hours. Disinclined to tantrums even in puberty, there wasn’t a shred of rebelliousness in him.

We didn’t have anything much to do with each other until we were sixteen. He called on me at home, shyly at first, with various pretexts, but soon he came every day and stayed for hours. What connected us was mainly that we didn’t have any friends; each of us in his own way enjoyed the reputation of a freak. But our conversations went into just about everything sixteen-year-olds can talk about, mostly books, especially those which were too complicated for us or where we only knew the title. And about sex: insights into the best ways to bring a girl to orgasm, the most intriguing places to do it, the most exciting positions, the comparative advantages of a virgin or a mature woman, and the secret inclinations of brunettes and blondes. Having exclusively theoretical knowledge of such matters was no hindrance to us. In other things, too, Goran liked to go into juicy details, smacking his lips like a connoisseur and pausing after spicy remarks to leave space for my admiration. I was well on the way to accepting him, if not as a replacement for my father, then at least as an elder brother–a kind of spiritual leader.

And then, without any warning or any subsequent explanation, he broke into the Chinese embassy. At that time, I should emphasise, an ambassador wasn’t someone you could just bump into on any street corner like in our Croatian metropolis today; you had to go off to the then capital, Belgrade. It already exceeded the comprehensible that he got on the train one morning like he otherwise got on the tram to school, after one of the identical evenings we spent together, and I don’t remember us then or earlier having ever, even obliquely, mentioned Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mao Ze or feng shui, or travelling to the end of the night, or an acte gratuit. According to the version which leaked through despite his parents’ secrecy, he roamed the unfamiliar city until midnight, climbed the iron fence and silently crawled in through a window left slightly open, as if just for him. Today, the media would zero in on that act of pubescent stupidity and blow it up into an incident between the two countries, but back then one had to hide every eccentricity and white out the decadent blemishes on the moth-eaten garb of self-managed socialism. Besides, Goran hadn’t given rise to any suspicions of spying; apparently he didn’t touch a single document or try to open any of the drawers. He just sat on the floor and waited for the Chinese bureaucrats and then, without resistance, let himself be taken away by the police, who briefly and unsuccessfully questioned him before returning him to his parents.

Time stood still for Goran after that. He was briefly institutionalised and then discharged for treatment at home, which proved unnecessary; he never ran away again or was a risk to anyone. He neither went back to school nor engaged with the world any more, although a few years later he started leaving the house again. Today you can still see him when he goes out on his walks, twice a day, sometimes in the middle of the night: he’s become the walking landmark of the neighbourhood. His walks are different to those where a person is accompanied by a dog, or takes a trip into the countryside, or has an issue to ruminate on. He’s become a phantom with empty eyes and mechanical movements, and he stopped returning greetings long ago. Sometimes children throw stones at him. When he gets hit, he stops for an instant and a spark of surprise flickers in his eyes, a kind of smile, but then they disappear around the corner in a flash. The years have left their mark on him in a ragged beard which clings to his cheeks, and grimaces which distort his face, but sometimes it seems you could catch a glimpse of something enigmatic inside, perhaps truly Taoistic.

There were others similar to him, thank God, and I may mention one or two later. Them recognising me as one of their own was largely thanks to my mother. According to generally accepted opinion, she was one of the loonies of the benign sort whom people like to run into in the street because they’re sure to come up with something interesting you can share with your family or flatmates and therefore allow all of you to feel better, more normal, and convinced that the Almighty has had mercy on you after all. You don’t let people like that into the house, of course, but they only turn up on your doorstep rarely anyway, for example with the diabolical insinuation that you’ve poisoned their cat, which they don’t dare to speak openly but just shoot at you with their crazy eyes. To shoo them away you just need to reply in a calm, ever so slightly raised voice: Lady, just move along now. You don’t hold it against them because you’re compassionate and will soon forget the incident; you’ll continue to greet them on the street and inquire after their health, although you know more than enough about them already.

I’ve never seen a more good-natured, grateful creature in my life than the cat. I found her in the meadow which the neighbourhood children used as a playground and the households as a disposal site: a bristling black kitten with clotted, scabby fur, which for hunger and trembling couldn’t even miaow. It opened its mouth in vain, crying out with its frightened eyes. Mother very nearly jumped out of her skin when she discovered her beneath my bed, but that was the first of only two things where I didn’t give in to her so often extravagant demands: I wept and blubbered and rolled on the floor until I won permission for the cat to stay. Cat was her name because Mother refused to call her anything else, so in the end I accepted it. She slept on my pillow and brought me mice and little birds; I didn’t know how to explain to her that I didn’t want to share them with her. Periodically there was the problem of her offspring to deal with. The first time, while I was at school, Mother incinerated them in the woodstove. You can imagine what it must have sounded like because disconcerted neighbours called the police, and the rest was written in Cat’s eyes. For days she whined softly on the floor by my bed and didn’t care for the food I brought her. With the other litters, Mother categorically refused any discussion: What am I to feed them with? What?! she cried in such a desperate voice that I fell silent. At least she didn’t burn them any more. But she took them away in a sack and I didn’t dare to ask where.

It would have been an exaggeration to say that Mother ever took a liking to Cat. But when she was poisoned with something which made her vomit yellow mucous for two days before dying, she cried together with me. Cat used to visit the neighbours’ houses, and she particularly loved children. A week before the event, our neighbour Mr Kruhek gave Mother a telling off: the dirty animal had given his daughters fleas, he said.

On my first day at school, Mother made a name for herself by introducing herself to the teacher as my father. Classical Freudiansm; those aware of the situation might have seen their theories confirmed. For others it served as my first labelling, an indication of what kind of family I came from.

Father was a concept bound to rear its head sooner or later, precisely because it was so painstakingly suppressed, swept out of everyday use and pulverised–it was meant to lose all meaning. With exemplary obedience, I accepted Mother’s explanation that I was the fruit of momentary weakness, what she called an ‘adventure’, with a Gypsy who had only been in town for a few days with his travelling orchestra. When I started asking questions as a child, that story seemed as convincing as any other, but over time I felt there was too much nebulousness in it to want to correct it. The neighbours also accepted it, although they knew full well what I found out ten years later: that my father wasn’t a Gypsy at all but a man who had led an orderly life alongside them, had bought a little plot nearby and was building a house; but as soon as his wife’s belly began to bulge he chickened out of both challenges overnight, never to be seen again. Mother’s family–there was never any mention of the other side–had no ear for her version of the truth and soon all contact was severed; I didn’t meet a single relative from one side or the other until my grandmother’s death.

And so my mother’s romantic inspiration gave me the nickname ‘Gypo’. It was underscored by my astonishingly dark complexion, bristly black hair and deep, almost black eyes, which tended to arouse unease in people, the instinct to look away, more than the desire to explore what was inside. I was never ashamed of that nickname, least of all in front of those who used it to demean me and exclude me from their games; for the latter, in fact, I was grateful.

Mother’s Gypsy was not merely a caprice, however, but also a form of penance. For reasons which were never elucidated, she blamed herself for her husband’s disappearance and intended to expiate it. The collateral damage to me was of no concern to her. In one of her hysterical states, as frequent as they were arbitrary, she uttered with blithe ignorance of the consequences that I was a sorry case; she’d never wanted to have children and everything could have been different if she hadn’t got pregnant; and me turning out the way I did–the cross she had to bear–was God’s way of punishing her. Oh, the curse of my behaviour… That word embodied one of the root evils, which no gestures or avowals to the contrary could dispel. However much I tried to please her, and although my extreme self-consciousness in early childhood severed any inclination to escapades, her use of the term your behaviour designated my certain descent into a career of substance abuse and my predetermined, inevitable matricide.

God arrived in her life at the same time as me; until then she’d been involved in purely worldly pursuits, but thanks to my birth she found her God. From that point on she never missed Mass and worked tirelessly to equip the house with little holy pictures, statuettes and olive branches. She even lit candles and gave alms at church as soon she had a few coins to spare and our most pressing needs had been satisfied. At work she was rewarded for her spiritual zeal with a demotion–the Yugoslav state frowned on any religious fervour–although cause and effect were not spelt out. She was replaced as municipal cultural officer by the typist, a woman who never finished high school, and Mother was made her assistant. She bore that blow heroically, not flinching from her beliefs despite the objections of others. Her response was to opt out of any effective activity and spend the rest of her working life on go-slow, practicing quiet sabotage, until this was interrupted by the democratic changes in the early nineties; and her job was immediately terminated. Aged fifty-three, in the middle of the war, she found herself on the dole. The only other thing she could do, being a graduate accordion teacher, was to try and make ends meet by giving private lessons, but her skill was anything but appealing at that moment in history; in oh-so-refined Croatia, few things were considered as barbarously Balkan as playing the accordion.

Mother didn’t even try to arouse my musical talent, but God was number one on the agenda. I went through the complete torture of confession, communion, confirmation, saying the Lord’s Prayer before bed and going on pilgrimages to Marija Bistrica. The merciless woman even managed–undoubtedly through the magnitude of her sacrifice–to have me accepted as an altar boy. But that didn’t last long, thanks to the unavoidable difficulties caused by my sooty black head jutting out of the angelically white habit and my dark hands wrapped around the candle–it reeked of a Satanic diversion.