Wall of Fire E-Book

Pam Stavropoulos

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 194

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Escape by intellect has long served him. Cultivation of the mind, at the expense of emotion, has long been his narcotic. But now that path is as lethal as the most potent drug or alcohol. Far from insulating him, excessive self-reliance has made him dangerously vulnerable. Arriving in Sydney Australia after fleeing the war in Yugoslavia, he is outwardly safe at least. Now it is the subjective snipers with which he must contend.

Leseprobe

Wall of Fire

Pam Stavropoulos

Copyright © 2020 Pam Stavropoulos

Publisher: tredition GmbH, Halenreie 40-44, 22359 Hamburg, Germany

ISBN

Paperback:

978-3-7497-9999-2

Hardcover:

978-3-347-00000-1

eBook:

978-3-347-00001-8

Printed on demand in many countries

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

SYNOPSIS

Throughout this war which is stunning in its savagery, I have managed to cordon off my feelings from my thoughts. To compartmentalise. But now the images of carnage are mounting; my psyche is flooding like a dam bursting its walls. I dream of vultures, pausing for the death throes of their prey. Of former sports stadiums converted to concentration camps. Of an expressionless expression. And of a silk scarf, fluttering in the breeze.

Dominic Vukasinovic has retreated into intellect. Cultivation of the mind, at the expense of emotion, has been his narcotic. But now that path is as lethal to him as the most potent drug or alcohol. And far from insulating him, excessive self-reliance has made him dangerously vulnerable.

Arriving in Sydney, Australia, after fleeing the war in Yugoslavia, he is outwardly safe at least. Now the snipers with which he contends are subjective. In his attempts to relate to his therapist, Alison Gage, who confronts internal battles of her own, Dominic taps depths of feeling which have previously been inaccessible. And which he is ill equipped to navigate.

CONTENTS

Part I Sarajevo 1994

1. Dominic

2. Dominic

3. Milos

4. Lena

5. Address to a spectator

6. Lena

7. Dominic

Part 2 Sydney 1995

8. Alison

9. Alison

10. Alison

11. Alison

Part 3 Transit

12. Dominic

13. Dominic

14. Dominic

15. Dominic

16. Dominic

Part 4 Encounter

17. Alison

18. Alison

19. Dominic

20. Dominic

21. Alison

22. Ares/Mars

23. Alison

24. Dominic

25. Alison

26. Alison/Dominic

27. Dominic

28. Alison

29. Dominic

30 Epilogue: Alison

Part 1 Sarajevo 1994

1. Dominic

I see something.

I crane forward to see it better. And feel the ligaments of my neck stretch and scream in protest. A pail of what appears to be red paint is flung at me.

Instinctively I raise my hand to protect my eyes. Before realising that I am shielded by glass, that I am in my car, and that it is the windscreen which has taken the onslaught.

Only it is not paint that has been thrown. It is blood. The streams and rivulets of which make of my windscreen an expressionist painting.

Along the roadside groups of people are congregated. They are busy driving five inch nails – which gleam like money – into makeshift crucifixes. Huddled under a tree is what appears to be a family (surely the small figure is that of a child!) And I know with paralysing shock what is soon to happen.

I can barely contain the horror which rises in me. Which causes me to tighten my grip on the steering wheel, to inadvertently accelerate. And to careen directly into what are now premature victims. My victims.

Oh my God.

The last thing I see is the crumpled figure of the child. And the slack arm of the mother from whose body it has been torn. Strangely, incredibly, I also see the contorted but smiling face of the man who is not yet dead.

At least, his sightless eyes seem to be saying, you cut short our suffering.

And the figures at the side of the road, as if relieved to be spared a task for which, after all, they felt no relish, turn to congratulate me.

Another image (there are more, always more).

This time I am with friends. This time all seems to be well.

We are having a picnic. We have selected a stately tree to sit beneath. Its richly clothed branches cast deep shade over the blanket on which we sit. The trunk of the tree is gnarled and tangled. It radiates solidity. And I enjoy a brief moment of serenity before something makes me glance up.

The inert body of a man hangs from a branch above. And there are other figures, swinging from other trees in ghostly parabolas.

The bile flows in my throat like a poison. I nudge my companion that he may witness and confirm what I am seeing. But he merely nods pleasantly. After the briefest of glances, he focuses again on the bread roll he is buttering. And on the wine he has just poured.

`Yes’, he says. `Aesthetically pleasing, isn’t it?’

As I gape in dumb incredulity, he gives me a look akin to complicity. And proffers a glass of wine which I am too stunned to reject.

They torch a church, and the flames rise like a benediction.

A wall of fire materialises before us; you expect the Holy Spirit to appear at its heart. There are no people in the church (what a pity, you can almost hear them thinking). The burning takes less than twenty minutes. Only the blackened edifice remains.

The phallic spire still intact.

The happy arsonists, murmuring quietly in deep contentment, pick the ruins delicately.

Fastidiously.

The worst are when people figure among the victims. The most excruciating are when they are people I know.

I wake in a cold sweat, my sheet soaked, my head pounding.

Once I woke to the sound of bullets. Or so I thought. Before realising that it was hail sounding on the roof. And that the particular horror from which I was emerging - both mirror and portent of actual horrors from which others do not emerge - was hallucinatory.

I am exhausted in the aftermath of these dreams. I am all day haunted by them. I leave in the morning with a saturated psyche. The macabre contents of which erupts without warning or catalyst.

Once I was mid-sentence in a lecture to ten students (we operate now – I can almost smile at this – on a `skeleton staff’). And a scythe took shape before me.

I yelled to the startled students to beware. Some of them were not even startled.

Sometimes I think it is my days that have become surreal, my nights a faithful reflection of reality.

But this spillage from my subconscious into the daylight hours is a new development.

And an increasingly disturbing one.

During prior periods of this war, the war which has stunned us in its savagery, I have managed to cordon off my days from my nights. To compartmentalise the daylight Apollonian realm from the dark Dionysian one.

It is important I do this for my students’ sake, if not my own. The decision to keep open the university was a deliberate act of hope and defiance. A sign that reason and learning could continue in the face of the madness. But except for a handful of students, the lecture theatres are empty. What would it do to the few who remain, against such odds, were their teachers to capitulate in front of them?

As I am perhaps starting to do now.

My psyche is flooding like a dam bursting its walls.

And yet some Finternal divisions remain. My reasoning faculty observes such lapses, which are increasingly the norm, with an almost clinical detachment.

I wonder what our few remaining students think. Some of them still take copious notes. Or at least appear to do so. But perhaps it is gibberish which trails from their pens. Perhaps it is less the desire for their education to continue than a clinging to ritual which accounts for their continued presence against such heavy odds.

I try to make it worth their while. I hear myself mouthing the words and phrases of a person in my position.

But it is making less and less sense to me. As perhaps to them. Maybe we are all clinging to the threads of normality. Until now I have felt it important to do so.

But I don’t know that anymore.

I don’t know anything anymore.

Perhaps they would be relieved were I to abandon the pretence, leaving them free to do so as well. As I was tempted to do yesterday.

No, more than tempted. Almost compelled. It was only with the greatest effort and self-restraint that I managed to keep myself in check. One of my students - Dimitri, with the sad, serious eyes – came to me after class. I knew without a word being exchanged that he had come for personal advice.

Advice! When at this point I can scarcely put one foot in front of the other.

Which must not yet be apparent to others.

I did my best to reassure him that reason would prevail in the end. That it is still worth the effort to keep planning; that the miniature of individual effort still counts. But I don’t think I believe it myself anymore (did I ever?) The unbidden question further frightens me.

And today. Today I was as close as I’ve been to complete mental capitulation.

Despite (or perhaps because) my conscious resolve is still strong.

I felt I had become an automaton. That the words I was mouthing were empty slogans which had nothing to do with me. To the subject I was discussing. Or to anything else at all.

I felt that the concepts I was trying to explain had become detached from any relationship to anything. That they were abstractions of abstractions. And perhaps had always been so.

I felt that perhaps now, for the first time, I was seeing things as they are. And found myself thinking (I who could always discipline my thoughts!)

You are not an academic any more. If you ever really were.

You are an actor.

2. Dominic

Sarajevo 1984. The Winter Olympics.

Almost impossible to evoke now, in the midst of devastation. People from all over the world had flocked to visit. The towns and resorts had been vibrant with energy and cosmopolitanism.

Where is the international interest now?

The depth of external indifference shocks him.

`It’s not Africa this time!’ he wants to shout.`It’s Europe!’

`It’s not `over there!’ You yourselves were here!’

But after a while the indignation freezes in his throat. Because even as the snow is stained with blood, the global inertia has congealed like rain in sub-zero temperature.

Why images of the 1984 Winter Olympics are returning to him now is difficult to fathom. He is beset by them. And is surprised by how many of them have been preserved intact.

He tries to resist those which are more personal. Focusing on them means an emotional thaw which, until now, he has managed to keep in check.

This is pain of a different kind. Which, as is his wont, he has all but succeeded in combating with intellect.

The Winter Olympics had been his last winter with Maja. Looking back on it now, it seems as if it was the last time he had come close to experiencing emotion.

Consciously he hadn’t registered the loss. Paradoxically, it represented a victory of sorts; product of the most difficult battle he had fought with himself.

Only now, consistent with his general psychic deterioration, he wonders whether it hadn’t been a crushing defeat.

He hadn’t allowed himself to grieve in the wake of Maja’s departure. With one unnerving exception, in which he had briefly cried like a baby, he had redirected his energies to professional achievement. Which had yielded different, if ultimately less satisfying, rewards.

Two major books, an array of conference papers and an associate professorship had provided comfort of a kind. Thinking meant he didn’t have to feel.

There had been other women after Maja. But these affairs had been strictly utilitarian. In his newly parlous state, he even experiences a pang of remorse about that. Wonders whether, and hopes not, he inflicted any casual wounds from which others might be suffering.

As he is suffering now.

But what he had experienced with Maja wasn’t casual. Why is he even now trying to pretend otherwise?

His academic ambition had been as voracious in her aftermath as his desire had been for her. Whatever his distaste for psychoanalysis, he can’t fail to appreciate the extent of his sublimation.

But why are images of her and their time together returning now? And with such crystalline purity? Like perfect, indelible hand prints under the many layers of consciousness. Their long inaccessibility imparts a sharper edge to their capacity to hurt.

One avalanche has precipitated another. He is submerged by a psychic landslide to which it is becoming increasingly difficult not to succumb.

Maja. The very name (so long since he has spoken it!) diffuses an ache. The belated intensity of which stuns him.

He had fought hard against her memory. As he had initially resisted her. Not that she had been the one to come on strongly. Quite the reverse in fact.

But his pursuit of her – determined, even relentless in some respects – had masked his psychological guardedness. It had been months before his emotional barriers, jealously guarded, had crumbled along with his physical defences (those had collapsed immediately).

The first few weeks of their relationship he had experienced a mind/body split so vast as to threaten the loss of equilibrium he seems to be facing now. Later she told him she had never met a man as insulated as he. Perhaps his remoteness had comprised part of his attraction for her. Maybe she had set it as a personal goal to crack his resolve; to see how long it would take. By the time she succeeded she was in love with him, if she hadn’t been before. And he with her.

At least, she had said she was in love with him. But he intercepts himself with this impulse to question and potentially destroy. A long dormant inner voice - barely audible in its rustiness from disuse - speaks up. And resists this attempt at ex-post facto denigration of what they had shared.

Why this perverse temptation to eradicate something precious? To deny the richness of their relationship? They had loved strongly and mutually. Realisation of this had been slow to him. But the more potent for the delay of its registering. To he who was so distrustful – who, part from training, part from temperament, distrusted and doubted everything – it had meant he was alive.

Sarajevo 1984. Fire and ice.

Neither of them particularly sports-minded, they had nevertheless attended many of the events. How could one fail to be impressed? These athletes were the best in the world.

The cult of perfection had always fascinated him. In this context physical prowess was honed to a fine edge. And discernible in the gleaming blades of skates which described graceful arcs before their eyes.

The silhouette of a lone skier on a mountain. The exquisite poise before the executed leap. These people defied gravity. Married technical expertise to sheer poetry.

And then physical activity of a different kind afterwards. Poetry of another type. After a light meal in one of the cafes, surging with the life they scarcely contained, he and Maja would go back to his flat.

For a brief moment he sees again the rumpled bedclothes. A pair of shoes she had often worn; the late afternoon light illuminating the red and bronze pattern in their leather. Maja.

It was the aftermath he had relished most. The time when the passion had ebbed from him – been wrung from him – like water from a sponge. When they made coffee and chatted of nothing in particular (were those the only occasions on which he could do that without experiencing a sense of wasted time?) And later still. When, also stimulated intellectually by her presence, he had sat at his desk to write.

Less frenziedly in those days, less compulsively. She’d had a way of wrapping herself around him from behind, of laying her cheek against his back. As if connected to a low pulse current, he was both relaxed and re-energised by her proximity.

And re-experiences, for a fraction of a second, the exhilarating languor it had induced.

Can’t he at least slow the images that are now rushing back?

And in that way regulate, if not minimise, their capacity to hurt?

Until recently that had been possible. But as if in mocking inversion of his former conscious control, he is powerless to do so now.

He wonders where she is after these several years. Whether, in the hell they are now obliged to inhabit, she is alive at all. The circumstances of their parting had been brutal – the accidental death of her seven-year-old son. The loss of her loved only child had been devastating to her. And even precipitated a brief reconciliation with her former husband, who was as shattered as she. For a while he had been sure she would come back to him. As perhaps she herself had been.

But the wellsprings of grief were merciless. Though she soon re-left her former husband, she did not re-join her lover. Perhaps – given the love he knew she felt for him – she saw renunciation of their relationship as some form of restitution. Because while she never intimated as much, Dominic knew she blamed herself for Nikolai’s death. And was obscurely convinced that had she been home the day it happened - instead of with her lover - it would not have occurred. In the strange and sad bargains we strike with ourselves, perhaps ending their relationship was her way of paying the piper.

Beyond some brief telephone conversations, and one desolate meeting in which the frozen wastes surrounding them had mirrored the devastation of their emotional landscapes, he had never seen her again. In desperation, he had phoned her former husband in search of her whereabouts. But the man had known nothing; had himself been enveloped in a cloud of pain and withdrawal so dense it seemed a cruel imposition to try to penetrate it. Instead and extraordinarily, they had drunk schnapps together. And had a stilted conversation.

Maja! His suppressed grief is now ignited. It courses through his body as if lit by a fuse. He needs to find some way to arrest and contain it. To delay confrontation with it until he is strong enough.

Not now! He tells himself. I can’t cope with it now!

The difference this time is that he knows he can’t rout memory by deferral.

That he has reached the limits of evasion. Such intensity of feeling demands only engagement with it. And thus the risk of capitulation.

Had he known the consequences of denial he would never have attempted it.

But assimilating deep grief, assuming this to be possible, cannot be concurrent with the psychic desolation he now faces on account of the war. In a kind of Faustian pact, he tells himself that if he can just summon the energy to confront it later – to somehow dilute it for a short time longer – until- until -

Until when?

Recognition that he is yet again trying to fight with conscious will – with precisely what had propelled him to this perilous impasse – brings him up short.

Isn’t excessive mental control the source of his danger?

How, with the stakes so high, can he quarantine feeling yet again?

Perceiving one escape route to be denied, he reaches for another in the form of more questions. Why can’t the unalloyed pleasure of his time with Maja console, at least to some extent, for the pain of having lost her? And why, for him, should retrospective pain be so much stronger than recollected happiness?

3. Milos

One of hundreds of hastily conscripted `soldiers’, he stands in line like everyone else.

Perhaps because of the unwelcome opportunity it affords for thinking, being stationary is somehow the most taxing task of all. Provided it isn’t civilians you are attacking, not even fighting is as difficult.

But then perhaps he is no longer capable of thought. Maybe the random, disjointed images which assail him in these line-ups are the residue of immediate experience, like the twitching of a dismembered corpse. For his self has surely been extinguished in one of the many battles in which he has been forced to participate.

No, `forced’ is the wrong word.

After a surprisingly short period of time, which means his moral sensibilities must have eroded significantly, no degree of force had been necessary. Devoid of all feeling and agency, he is like a sleep-walker.

`Battle’ seems the wrong word too. It seems to dignify with some kind of plan or purpose what is totally senseless and shambolic.

But no, that’s not right either.

Because systematic ruthlessness is never haphazard.

As a child, he had read about battles. About the often heroic stature of the men who fought them. What he is engaged in bears no resemblance to those. And there are now no heroes.

Perhaps not even men.

Sometimes at night he is woken by the stifled moans of those around him. Initially he had seized on these spontaneous eruptions of suffering. Had seen in them confirmation, as well as consolation, that neither he nor his comrades had entirely abrogated human status. But with the first rays of dawn and return to consciousness, there is no acknowledgment of these nocturnal emissions, no meeting of eyes. It is as if anguish over the infliction of pain is indeed as pointless and irrelevant as guilt over masturbation.

Yes, we have ceased to be men.

Yet we are not all the same either. Perhaps there is comfort to be found in that. Notwithstanding the internalised censorship of emotion, he can detect those for whom, like himself, the carnage is unpalatable rather than a source of gratification. Despite the range of possibilities in between, it seems the division of response amounts, in the end, to this.

He calculates that two thirds of his compatriots experience at least no enthusiasm for what they are doing. The remaining third seem to relish it.

And we all know who each other is.

Confirmation of which side of the dichotomy to which a fellow soldier adheres is sometimes slow in coming, sometimes swift like a blade. But is always accompanied by a sense of danger as well as revelation. Knowledge of the other – as of the other in oneself – is itself hazardous.

The greatest revelation and source of danger is the extent to which those in authority welcome and subtly reward (are they capable of subtlety?) those conscripts who are enthusiastic in execution of their `duty’. Not too enthusiastic of course. For all sorts of reasons, too overt a passion for destruction is not to be encouraged. At least when it is undisciplined.

But those who can be `counted on’ always receive extra approbation and rations. Those like himself, who are merely quietly compliant, receive no such rewards. He marvels now that he could ever have been surprised by this.

From where had these `superiors’ come?