Dogs and Others E-Book

Biljana Jovanović

• Herausgeber: Istros Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 269

Beschreibung

The protagonist in Dogs and Others is the first openly lesbian character in modern Serbian literature, but she is also so much more than that, as she encapsulates the zeitgeist of her generation. Coming of age in 1970s Belgrade, then the capital city of thriving, socialist Yugoslavia, we follow Lida and the bohemian life she leads, made more complicated by the trials and tribulations of her eccentric family. The whole novel breathes with a raw sensibility so aptly captured in the voice of the heroine — a striking, rebellious, overtly feminist and somewhat neurotic young woman.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Dogs and Others

Translator's Preface

In Place of an Introduction

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

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XXI

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XXIX

A Death in the Neighbourhood: On the Work of Biljana Jovanović

Bibliography

The Translator

BILJANA JOVANOVIĆ

DOGS AND OTHERS

Translated by John K. Cox

First published in 2018 by Istros Books

London, United Kingdom www.istrosbooks.com

Copyright © Estate of Biljana Jovanović, 2018

This book was first printed in Serbia, Psi i ostali (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1980).

The right of Biljana Jovanović, to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Translation © John K. Cox , 2018

Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak, www.frontispis.hr

ISBNPrint: 978-1-912545-16-2MOBI: 978-1-912545-17-9ePub: 978-1-912545-18-6

The publisher wishes to acknowledge the support of the Serbian Ministry of Culture & Media in the publication of this book.

Translator’s Preface

Most names and other proper nouns in this translation have been left in their original Serbo-Croatian (as Jovanović would have said) forms. An exception was made for the most common version of the narrator’s first name, Lidija, which we have rendered as Lidia for the sake of readability.

The text used as the basis for this translation was Biljana Jovanović’s Psi i ostali (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1980).

Understanding This Book

Certain generalizations about plot or style, or specific notes on scenes, hard-won by another reader, can make a complex, or intricate, novel such as this one easier to understand. For instance, without a character list for the whole work, it might be helpful to untangle all the characters whose names begin with the letter ‘M’:

Marina – the mother of Lidia and Danilo, who is mostly absent and often cruel

Marko – Danilo’s dodgy friend

Mihailo – the father of Lidia and Danilo, who hanged himself a decade or so ago

Milena – Lidia’s lover, a friend of Danilo and Čeda Little River

Mira – Danilo’s girlfriend

In terms of style, readers should be aware that Lidia’s narration contains many meta-references (e.g., questions about things she just said) and ‘experienced details’ in the tradition of the French nouveau roman; there are also neologisms (sometimes adjectives, as in ‘crumby’, as opposed to ‘crummy’; but often adverbs, as in ‘postmanly’ and ‘bankerly-cordially’) and, in recorded speech, drawled or drawn-out words spelled with urgently repeated vowels.

Subject matter such as bodily fluids (snot, semen, rheum, secretions connected to sexually-transmitted diseases), raw sexuality, and characters pinioned uncomfortably in the city’s infernal machine might qualify the text as a kind of ‘dirty realism’, but its political content is equally obvious. The settling of accounts of a traditional-minded man (is it a man?) with. second-wave feminism in Chapter 25 is highly unsettling, but instructive.

There are many ways to read, or interpret, this novel. Literary critics have noted that it is here, in her second major work of prose, that Jovanović ‘found her voice’. Indeed, her breakout success from two years earlier (1978), Pada Avala (Eng.: Avala is Falling) became a cult classic; and although it was, in the opinion of this translator, far too transgressive and energetic to deserve the label ‘jeans prose’, that is how it is often designated to this day. But Dogs and Others delivered a wholescale re-imagination of the role of the author and the narrator, and here Jovanović took her art to a different level. (Her third novel, My Soul, My One and Only from 1984, and her unfinished fourth novel from the 1990s, move into different territory yet again.)

Literary scholars, of course, also sort out how this book is put together, how it functions, and why it works. One notices immediately the pell-mell energy of the digressive narration; the intertextuality (various letters, pamphlets, and flashbacks set off from the main text); the mystifying epigraphs; and the free and stubborn images – dreams looking for vocabulary, images looking for form. And yet, the novel holds together. The red threads lead somewhere. The references come home to roost. It’s not a farce, not an ironic romp, not an act of heedless satire or feckless cynicism.

Consideration or analysis of the content of the novel is also both demanding and valuable. Jovanović herself noted that the novel was ‘a debt, a debt to myself, to bring things that seemed important to me at the time out into the open, and to strip them completely naked’. Is this novel the fruit of the evolution of the increasing tide of creditable woman-centred writing in Yugoslavia, distilled into rocket fuel by the addition of feminist sensibilities from the West? How important is the fact that this novel contains what appears to be the first detailed depiction of a sexual relationship between two women in Serbian literature?

Interesting historical explanations, stressing the socio-economic or even political context of the plot and the times in which the manuscript was produced and published, are also possible. Jovanović was too young to be a direct part of the ‘generation of 1968’, but not too young to engage or interact (positively and negatively) with that movement’s causes and ideals. She was definitely too young to be considered one of the ‘children of communism’. Related phenomena such as membership in the ‘red bourgeoisie’ or, as some of her critics might say, her generation’s position as beneficiaries of post-war social mobility who supposedly repaid the system with unruliness or anarchism also miss the mark, but they are in circulation. Also plausible are critiques of work like hers from the Marxist or neo-Marxist; the presence of the Praxis philosophers in Yugoslavia during her lifetime provides a lot of ready material for analysis. One could also take, ideologically or historically, a Titoist perspective, whereby Jovanović’s novels can be seen to deviate from the established canon of ‘socialist aestheticism’ or ‘Partisan realism’. One could also maintain, as does this observer, that Jovanović’s attention to radically new subjects and her transgressive literary innovations amount to social criticism, which in turn represents a kind of urban extension, and logical continuation, of the ‘anti-fascist moment’ of World War II.

John K. Cox, Fargo, USA. 2018

*

This translation is dedicated to William E. ‘Bill’ Schmickle, the most brilliant teacher I ever had. No one ever lit up Founders Hall or Duke Memorial with ideas and lectures and writing the way he did, and no professor ever pushed me as hard or rewarded me as generously.

In Place of an Introduction

This story does not consist of night-and-day phantasmagorias, but of Dogs and Others. No joke: Others and Dogs. Since a position favouring the relativity of truth is psychologically more justifiable than one favouring the absoluteness of truth, and since it’s not out of the question that it’s also epistemologically more reliable, then it’s true – and let us thank God for it – it’s true, that which is written in books, in church and in other places: Dogs always believe that they belong to Others (whom they consider to be, for unknown reasons enduring right up to our day, better than they are). The Others are not always convinced that they are not themselves Dogs. Still, though, Dogs are Others and Others are Dogs. The one thing that actually distinguishes them from each other, now and again (and something that justifies singling them out for participation in this story), is the level of their (as numerous personages are wont to say, and learned ones at that) social adaptation.

What nonsense! What’s this sort of thing supposed to mean to Dogs? Or especially to Others?

Whatever – both the one group and the other suffocate in the same typical stinking mess that is life:

I

For a longish, and rounded, amount of time (like a lie on Jaglika’s lips), I took, with the certainty of an idiot, her stories and those of Marina to be images from my own childhood; and of course I believed unshakably in my ownership of those images. I’m not sure when that all went up in smoke! All efforts up to this point have been inaudible (unsuccessful), like clacking one’s dry, untrimmed fingernails together or timidly scratching the edge of a table with a pin; there was a huge tangle in my head and I felt it whenever I tried to remember something, or with inappropriate ambition tried to recall anything at all with complete accuracy; the bit that I could get my hands on was quickly lost amid the concentric braid of other pictures, and there was no way for me to find the beginning or the end. And then everything snapped, went off like a bomb; no; like a hundred and twenty glasses tossed from the tenth floor; and nothing remained; not even anything like the rubber stub that’s left behind when a balloon pops or, you know, an inflated plastic bag explodes.

I was free! I realized that I remembered nothing, that, instead of me, Jaglika and Marina were doing the remembering; that I had never recalled anything; and that the two of them were swindling me and, sneakily, and stealthily (kisses and baby-talk), pulling me into the mutual family memory. I thought: such gratitude for emptiness! I could shove everything inside (where it’s empty, like into the biggest hole in the world); falsehoods from anybody; even the most far-fetched, random fabrications. That’s how I started off inventing my own childhood; with no malice and no vanity; with empty space inside myself, around me, all around, everywhere…

Everything that I would think up and narrate to myself, in a whisper at first; once or twice – depending on the length of the story; and then I would repeat it out loud, before going to sleep, with my eyes wide open, in the dark; and the story (an image from childhood – which only appeared not to exist) would settle into its spot in my brain.

The next day I checked: I would sneak up on Jaglika, and start up a conversation first about her glasses, then her aching joints, homeless women and cuckolded men; and then, in the middle of the conversation, I would say, as if by chance: ‘Hey, baba, do you remember that?’ Or: ‘What was that like, baba? You used to know that…’ Jaglika would ask what I was getting at, and wriggle joyously in her seat – happy that I had faith in her memory, and that’s how she fell into the trap. I told her only the basic framework of a story (the picture), devised the night before, leaving out the dates and more detailed parts; otherwise Jaglika would discover my deception. And so she could continue the stories one after another to the end.

For several days running, I carried every fabricated story (in my arms, in my mouth) to the half-deaf and half-blind Jaglika. The fact that Jaglika took part wholeheartedly in it all only showed that it was realistic to assume that all the pictures (stories), from this point on, as far as the eye could see, all of them made or invented by night, happened or were happening, or were just about to happen, at some time or other and to some person or other, or even to me!

At that point it took me a great deal of time to realize that I imagined some of these things as: freedom of fabrication, that is to say, freedom of memory; one could say that I was suffering from unknown illnesses, but I had attributed special significance to them; I thought I’d be able to disconnect from the family memory (Jaglika the creator – her memories go back the furthest; Marina the great magus; Danilo and I, the assistants; our relatives – probationary helpers) simply because I truly recalled nothing! And that the flexible hole (no limits) in my brain was the reason that I believe I became a heretic by my own volition and merit; and in fact every invention was overloaded in advance; it was only possible to concoct things according to how they happened and not in any other way. And it all looked like this: I’d think up a story; I’d try absolutely as hard as I could (dear God, it’s so taxing!) not to alter it even the tiniest bit; I’d push it (the story), just temporarily; I’d move it around exactly as much as necessary for space to open up, at least one tiny little spot in my otherwise meagrely-stocked brain, for the next image (story); and so on, one after the other; I’d find a spot for one, and when the next one arrived, I’d move it, and when the third one came in, I’d even have to squish that second one, too; but before I’d compress it I’d push it gently and politely to the back, as if we were on the bus: ‘Just a bit more, if you don’t mind, so I can set down my bag … Beg your pardon, oh little brain of mine with the images, make a little room for me!’ And then they (the ones in the bus) would say: ‘Check that out. As if her pictures, or her brain, were anything special. I mean, really!’

To tell the truth, there is one little thing pertaining to the fabrication of childhood that turns out to be an advantage when compared to a non-fabricated, so-called genuine childhood: there isn’t any subconscious or similar understory; there’s no interpretation; there is none of that clowning around with psychoanalysis; the possible objection from those quarters (from the psychoanalysts and other, different people) would call into question completely my invention of a childhood (calling it non-memory, or the equivalent thereof) – such a thing (my thing) simply isn’t possible all by itself; that it would come down like a bolt out of the blue without reasons, up there in the blue; but since psychoanalysis still cannot discern how something started, and that is its position, at least as far as I’m concerned – at the bottom of the water with a stone on my neck, plus a rope – but for others, okay, maybe it’s not quite drowning but it is ‘That’s kind of like old news, or a little bit pregnant.’

So what I told Jaglika went like this: there were dark hallways all around me; on the walls hung small black and white pictures of various animals, like those little drawings in the chocolate bars that came in the blue wrappers; these extremely tall people kept showing up; more and more of them; I think it was always at noon (how did I know that, if there wasn’t any window!); they measured my forehead; they wrote on some pieces of paper; shook their heads as they were leaving, every one of them did it and they all did it the same way (as if they were duplicates, or rather doubles, of each other) and always, I mean really every time, they said the same thing: ‘Her face is narrow and ill-humoured; see you tomorrow, goodbye!’

And Jaglika told it to me like this: ‘The dark corridors are the basement where we used to live; it was always dark; you were sick with scarlet fever; that’s when Dr Vlada used to come by, every single day… Do you remember Vlada?… He checked in on you… You weren’t good for anything, and we all thought you were going to die…’

Thus, according to Jaglika, the little pictures on the walls were flypaper strips, and the pieces of paper were prescriptions; since it was dark, the fact that it seemed like midday to me was the result of a large high-wattage lamp, which Dr Vlada would turn on above my head, and so forth.

Fantastic! Jaglika thought it all up; indeed Jaglika did think it all up, as did I, incidentally! Never, and I knew this for sure, never did we live in a basement; we never had sticky fly-paper tape on our walls; and especially never any lamp with a big bright bulb; I never had scarlet fever, and so on … After several similar attempts (a tale told to Jaglika; with her just fabricating it differently) I was no longer capable of differentiating what was Jaglika’s from what was mine from what was a third party’s, that Jaglika, as demiurge, truly remembered (the right of the creator is untouchable even when she is lying). It seemed to me that I was again getting tangled in a snare (what a stupid animal!) of other people’s memories, no matter whether real or fabricated, and that the imagined freedom of emptiness has the shape and the sizzle of a lie, a lie from Jaglika’s cracked lips. I gave up on talking to anyone, save to myself, in the evening, in the dark, eyes wide open; along with all the others, I received a new power of imagination: I believed that every story was irrevocably true.

But Jaglika did not leave off; she enjoyed talking and watching my face full of trust (a creator also needs flattery); she extracted from her head piece after piece of outright lying (truly one never knows!), carefully, as if she were brushing lock after lock of her hair, which by the way did not exist; I did not have many opportunities, more precisely, I had just one possibility: ‘Baba, how about if I read the newspaper out loud. Eh, granny? Put those stories of yours away for now!’ Jaglika, however, would shake her head unhappily, bring her morning cup (full of dust – it was already noon) of tea (the orator was taking refreshment) to her lips and go on babbling; she just pushed those little extracts right into my ears, along with her lies, which were no worse than mine but for exactly that reason created unbearable confusion in my head. ‘Baba, stop it … That’s not important anymore, it’s the past,’ I said repeatedly; and then I would cover her in loud headlines from her favourite newspapers: woman is the pillar of the family, woman factory owner kills her child so her lover will marry her, directions for large and small needlepoint projects, freshen up your surroundings; and in this way, not stopping until I was dead certain that Jaglika had forgotten what she’d been recalling; and until she stopped grumbling: ‘OK, OK, but I’ve got a good one for you.’ Normally this took half an hour, sometimes less, and then Jaglika’s face would light up; then I would wander around the room looking for her glasses – she never knew where she’d left them just a moment before, but they were always either on the window sill or under her pillow.

II

A famous Yugoslav poet, a woman, well known in those days, in my house, in my room, while Danilo and Jaglika were sleeping; she had hung her polyester panties on the highest hook on my clothes-tree; she lifted her skirt part-way up (exposing her huge flabby thighs) and headed off to the bathroom; her lover lay on my bed, a man twenty years younger than she was, and hence a little older than me, with a low brow, a conspicuously low brow, and with long, bowed legs (that’s all I was able to see since the rest of his serviceable body remained under the blanket); the poet hadn’t shut the door, neither the one to the bedroom nor the one to the bathroom, and thus Danilo, who, judging from everything, hadn’t slept a wink since the two of them had entered the house, found her bent over the sink, with her legs spread (maybe under the sink!). There he stood, thunderstruck, and then he sprinted into his room, embarrassed, frightened; he stared at me, goggle-eyed (I was seated on the floor) and at the poet’s lover on the bed, and then back at me, and slamming his door shut, he ran into his room without uttering a word, not even one letter of a word, not even a sound, without anything really (God, it was as if he’d been struck dumb by horror). In a little while the poet came by with her hitched-up skirt, asking for a towel.

That night I slept in Jaglika’s room, on a mattress; on the floor; right up till morning I listened to Jaglika’s diligent snoring, whimpering, and the grinding of her teeth. I was convinced that all this wasn’t coming out of her toothless mouth. Instead, the noises were souls, the souls of her Montenegrin-Hungarian ancestors, which, like all species of Hymenoptera, obdurately, annoyingly, the whole blessed night (the lamp on the table near the head of her bed was turned on – Jaglika was afraid to dream in the dark, and incidentally so am I) flew circles around her head, and from time to time around mine, probably remembering that I am Jaglika’s descendant. In view of the fact that my grandmother, with her Hymenoptera, the lamp she left on, the quinces beneath the radiator, the sputum in the old newspapers four thick under her bed, was in the other part of the apartment, I couldn’t hear Danilo’s creeping about or his pacing, clearing his throat occasionally (like the kind in movies about fear and terror) in front of the door to the room in which the poet and her lover were sleeping. They were going to tell me all that the next day. Among other things, that Danilo at least ten times during the night (so the poetess said, but poets, male and female, love to exaggerate of course) opened their door all the way and just stood there, every time, in the door-frame, immobile, for several minutes (that’s what the poet said: several minutes) and, she said, for that reason the two of them couldn’t sleep a wink. At first they called out to him to come in, they turned on the light; the poet said she had not seen such a beautiful and spectral boy for ages; I told her that he would be twenty-nine this fall and that he wasn’t a boy, but she reiterated: ‘The little guy stared with those enormous eyes of his and he stood there, just stood there so awkwardly!’ Danilo does have bulging eyes, but otherwise, cross my heart, and cross something lower if I have to, there were a lot of things about this that mattered to her, but that doesn’t matter.

That day they left at noon; the lover rubbed his watery eyes, offering me at the same instant his other hand, small and perspiring, but warm; the poet was visibly angry, and she didn’t say goodbye, but Danilo said, from the doorway when the two of them were in the lift, happily, serenely, like he was hitting a ping-pong ball their way: ‘Why didn’t you go to a hotel? It definitely would have been more to your liking there!’

But then, in the very next minute, I hear the poet’s voice from the street: ‘Lidiaaa! Lidiaaa!’ I ran down the stairs (I could have broken both of my legs). There was Danilo, dear God he was down there, how’d that happen so fast, just a moment ago he…

He was standing there clinging to her chubby upper arm like a little child as he said over and over, stuttering, with spittle on his lips and an incomprehensible plea in his bulging eyes: ‘Why don’t you come by for a visit… Why don’t you drop in…’ and then, catching sight of me: ‘Lida, tell them, tell her, Lida…’ The poet smiled, a touch maliciously and a little bit like a bad actress; the lover stared at Danilo like at a rabid (dangerous) but pathetic dog.

All that day Danilo kept on asking me, at short intervals, ‘Why didn’t you tell them? Why didn’t you say it, Lida?’ Not completely certain of myself, and pretty much exhausted, I replied that the poet and her lover had just left, a moment ago, or two hours ago, but for Christ’s sake really recently, and what could he want now, anyway, he had walked them out, he had seen them off all nice and proper, the poet and the lover with the officer’s cap pulled all the way down over his low forehead, and now they’ve probably gone to a hotel, or on to another city; ‘For God’s sake, Danilo, you told them to do that yourself!’

That’s when Danilo’s feelings of abandonment started to grow: he ran after unknown people in the street, he turned people back as they left our building, he called out to them from the window, beseeching them, making them swear, acting like a cry-baby to get them to return, to drop in on us; and all of them save Marko (Danilo’s friend from senior and primary school) shook their heads (as if they were sages), swaggered about and thought and stared the same way the poet and her lover did: this boy is ill (pathetic dog), this boy is dangerous (mad dog), and they stopped coming by. He asked the taxi driver who drove us to Mira’s place (she was Danilo’s pretend girlfriend) whether he loved him, to which the taxi driver wisely replied that he basically didn’t have any reason to hate him, and that for him Danilo was a customer just like any other customer. Danilo insisted that the man come up with an answer about loving him or not, which was for heaven’s sake nothing if not appropriate, since the question had been whether he loved him or not, and not whether he had a reason to hate him. Later, when we had arrived (after a few minutes), as I was rummaging about in my purse looking for money, Danilo said to the taxi driver: ‘I should introduce you two. This is my sister Lidia.’

He locked himself in his room for days and nights on end. He didn’t go out, at least during the time I was at home. Jaglika, near the end of her days and on the verge of dying, with thoughts and memories that were twenty years old, or fifty, and then twenty again, asked: ‘Where has my Dankitsa gotten to? I haven’t seen him since he was only this big, you know?’

And then came a switch: for the whole day, when I was off at the library, he sat with Jaglika; and when I came home he didn’t budge from my side, until late in the evening – he’d fall asleep in my bed with his head squeezed up against my back. In the morning he’d be awake before me, and a long while before Jaglika would start to shout from the other side of the house: ‘Lidiaaa!’

As if he hadn’t slept at all, his eyes were opaque and yet again, too big, prominent.

‘In which bedroom can I take cover?’

‘Huh? Danilo, you’re in a bedroom.’

‘You don’t get it at all … Anyway. What room do I go to? Don’t play the fool here.’

‘Danilo, I’m in a rush to get to work. Go to sleep.’

‘But really, Lidiaaa… I’m asking you. What’s wrong with that fat old bag-lady in there?’

‘What are you ranting about? What fat lady?’

‘Don’t even pretend like you don’t know, Lidia!’

‘Listen, Danilo, I’m gonna be late for work.’

‘You’re always urging me to love people but I can’t love them and that fat woman can’t do it either, just so you know. Not even grandma can stand it anymore, in case you were wondering.’

‘I’m in a hurry, Danilo. Good grief. I’ve got no time.’

‘Why are you shouting, why are you always shouting, Lidia?’

‘Put a sock in it, you idiot. Go see what Jaglika’s doing! Off you go now.’

‘Hold on, Lidia. I told you, and Baba will tell you, that she’s not going to put up with that naked fool any more, just so you know. You’re always dragging them into the house and nobody can stand it any more. And by the way that woman’s a whore.’

‘Stop it you jerk that’s enough!’

‘Why are you screaming…Why are you screaming?!’

‘Go check on what grandma’s up to…’ and with that I slammed the door behind me; Danilo’s yells followed me to the front door of the building, and as I was running across the street, I could hear him, probably from the balcony now (I didn’t turn around) as he roared and cursed.

III

‘There will never exist a person who possesses definite knowledge of the gods and of the matters I am talking about. And even if this person were in a position to tell the whole truth, he or she would know that this wasn’t the case. But all people get to have their own imagination.’

– (R.P. Lo4 [X of K.] J.B.)

‘Hey listen, Lidia, last night I had another dream about that riot of colours; first they ran, and then they jostled each other, golden yellow, purplish green and stale wine-red, and dark red, too, and that beige like Mira’s skirt, and a blue, a thin blue colour, you know the one, Lida, it always whizzes by like lightning, my head starts aching from it, it’s like a whistle, Lida, it whizzes and flashes and then goes boom – that’s all she wrote – Lida, are you listening to me?’

I nod my head and think to myself how dead certain I am that Danilo is devouring at least two bars of chocolate at the same time when he chomps and spits so unbearably like this, with saliva running from the corners of his mouth. I go on picking up the newspapers strewn about and say to him: ‘I’m listening to you. Go on!’ And he says: ‘I dreamt that Mira came, with an enormous towel around her head, as if she’d been washing her hair, and all at once everything on her started to drip, like an ice cream cone, just like that, Lidia… Then, behind her, there appeared that guy from a few days ago, the guy with the three sweaters on, d’you hear, Lidia, the guy who slept with that naked fat creature, the one that Grandma said she couldn’t stand to see any more, and she came, too, only I didn’t see her right away; it was only after Mira and the guy got undressed and lay down on that towel from her head; it was like they were cadavers, Lidia, they just lay there and didn’t move any more; and Mira, she was hideously thin… then I saw that fat, naked lady; actually, she came up to me from behind and plugged my ears with some pinkish plugs, terribly hard, and she started rubbing me here, behind my earlobes and then eventually my eyelids, Lida, just imagine that. She was so rude, Lidia! Lidia, is she always so rude? When she started to undress me, it was so unbalanced, by that I mean all from her side, as if she’d gone bonkers, she was shaking all over – she broke the belt loop on my pants and Lidia the moment she touched my zip I went half-crazy and when she unbuttoned me down there I came like a rifle, all over her, Lida, I splattered her everywhere, and she just seemed lost in thought, she pretended that she didn’t see. Afterwards that beige colour spread over us, beige darkness, you understand? Nothing was visible for a while, like looking through watery sand, right up until the pent-up colour came hissing out of Mira’s eyes, with interruptions, like when you pee and have an irregular stream, very similar… Afterwards I saw that you were standing off to one side and you were, like this, look, Lida, on your middle finger like this you were spinning a pair of nail scissors and behind you Jaglika was hopping around, whispering something to you, and then came the worst part with the colours, Lida, are you listening to me… and Lida, stop that now, stop it, Lida, sit down…’