I realised I would have to leave the house as soon as possible. It was still out of the question for me to enter the bedroom and so I left it locked. But since the wardrobe containing my clothes was in there, that restricted my choice of attire for the night. I decided that anything would do and opted for the white linen suit hanging in the hall. True, I knew it would make me look like a pimp, but I considered that persona quite appropriate for a writer. Because what do writers do if not pimp out their life to lustful readers? They always write about themselves whether they want to or not, just as they’re always occupied with themselves, whatever they do. To be a writer therefore means to pimp oneself, which is a perfect, self-sufficient form of prostitution, integrating both the pimp and the whore – both the marketing and the finished product.
So there I was, dressed up in the white suit and walking along the road past my father’s house. I thought I could hear Bach playing inside but I wasn’t sure because an easterly breeze was shaking the tops of the olive trees. Their murmur merged with the ever-present din of the crickets, making the summer evening a wall of sound. Then I was down on the road, in the shine of the street light which was working for a change. And finally I found myself in the car, and the engine of my SUV rumbled as I flipped through the CDs in the glovebox, searching for Sonic Youth and their Song for Karen.
Uncle’s hill was still burning and the fire brigade was busy. They had parked their ridiculous red truck in the middle of the road, forcing me to squeeze between it and the illegally parked patrol car the police had arrived in. They’d come to ensure order in our suburb during the fire, but as usual they caused even greater chaos. My neighbours were there too, of course, with their emaciated cows, their scrawny, mangy dogs, and their children, who were the most undernourished and grubby of all. On top of that, these offspring were thickheaded, full of juvenile gazes which exuded a blend of primitivism and prurience – that most dangerous of all pernicious combinations of human characteristics. The adults, cows, dogs and this dubious brood were all milling around on the road, all of them equally incoherent in expressing their fear of the fire which seemed to blaze more brightly the more the fire brigade endeavoured to put it out. They all held their heads in desperation, mooed, thrashed their tails, wailed and barked. Every living thing becomes unbearably sordid the moment it fears for its life. And, as a rule, those who count for least are most afraid. There’s no pitiful human being who won’t make a drama out of their death if they find out they’re incurably ill. Everyone around them will immediately be informed of their misfortune and will even be expected to show sympathy. In keeping with the old friend-in-need-is-a-friend-indeed truism, I saw that my neighbours’ relatives were starting to arrive too; people whose only thought was how fortunate they were that their own house wasn’t on fire. The relatives shook their heads in fake concern and consoled the wretches who were preoccupied with their bad luck and the forest igniting right next to their house.
There I was, hurriedly departing that Golgotha of human dignity. Tunic, Song for Karen – an awesome piece of white noise about death – blared from the car as I drove down into town. And there I was, thinking how diligent the pyromaniacs had been that night: the rubbish containers were ablaze all along the street. Like torches on the wall of a cave they illuminated the main thoroughfare leading down to the centre of unbridled touristic repulsiveness.
But I didn’t get far. There was a commotion like a mass-meeting in front of the mosque which forced me to park the car and continue on foot. I literally had to struggle through the crowd. So many people could only have gathered because of a fatality, I thought. Maybe the muezzin had fallen from the minaret. Perhaps he was taken out by a man with a rifle who, after a gruelling and stressful day, was just trying to get to sleep when he started bawling his Allahu akbar. Or maybe he’d woken someone who’d just fallen asleep, an irascible man who was already at wits’ end without the muezzin’s holy droning – a walking time bomb who could explode at any moment. Yes, that’s probably what happened; the muezzin called a bullet instead of the believers. The transcendental can be irritating, I mused, especially when it comes unwanted. But that supposition proved to be wrong: no-one had killed the muezzin. Instead, it turned out that a son had killed his father, after doing in his mother and brother too.
What incredible things you hear if you only mix with the crowd! Impelled by curiosity, I joined the mob in front of the mosque. People whispered about a crime they said was terrible and ‘unprecedented’, while I thought that an unprecedented crime would truly be something new. It would be hard to add an unwritten chapter to the comprehensive history of crime. Surely everything has been written about already, and all that happens from then on is just the perpetual repetition of the same code of crime.
‘A father killing his son is sort of imaginable, but this?’ people repeated in their astonishment. Those good folk of Ulcinj were ill-informed: patricide is a reinforcing bar in the foundations of this world. Sometimes it is symbolic, but sometimes people – particularly those of modest intellect – resort to literal patricide. ‘Can you believe it? Such a peaceful family, who’d have thought!’ People’s comments reminded me of the crime reports in our daily papers, every single one of which ended with the sentence: ‘The neighbours are shocked by the crime. The murderer and the victims were a harmonious family, to all appearances, and there had been nothing to herald this tragedy.’ If asked, people are always stunned when a crime occurs, even one as commonplace as patricide, which every adult has committed in their infantile mind, while those who haven’t yet broken free of the deadly embrace of the father commit it later. There’s no family in this world which cannot be the scene of the most terrible murder. As long as they live, parents destroy their children, and their children pay them back for it and don’t relinquish their thirst for vengeance until they’ve sent their parents to the grave. Every family home can turn into a slaughterhouse. A tiny catalyst of just a single word is often all it takes for the history of abuse and hatred, hidden under a semblance of harmony and love like in an old-fashioned memento chest, to end in bloodshed.
And yet, although a variation on a well-known theme – an evergreen crime, so to speak – this murder was interesting in its own right. The murdered father had been a lovely man, people said: a retiring, pious man who minded his own business. ‘He never did anyone any harm, and look what happened to him,’ a voice called from the crowd. The others agreed, while I was hoping that the fellow would soon finish his tribute to the deceased and move on to the gory details. After all, that’s why we find murders interesting.
The son was an absolute no-gooder, they said. It had been clear from an early age that he’d be a reprobate. But his father, that lovely man, was eternally forgiving. ‘Don’t underestimate the power of forgiveness,’ he told his friends, who believed in the power of punishment. To my mind, his downfall was caused by him preferring forgiveness to corporal punishment. The boy stole. Whatever he could swipe from the neighbour’s garden and whatever he could stick into his pockets at the market, he took it. And then there was grandma’s jewellery, grandfather’s antique pistol and his cousin’s bike. He even stole when he knew he’d be found out and punished. They say his mother died of shame. They caught him pickpocketing the mourners at her funeral. Over time, the neighbourhood began to blame him for every single burglary. Not that they were far wrong: their suspicions were justified most of the time. But occasionally they’d accuse him of things he hadn’t done, just enough for him to become acquainted with injustice and to realise that no-one has a monopoly on it – you constantly inflict injustice on others, and they constantly inflict it on you.
There would be a furious banging on the gate of their house, interrupting the father’s afternoon rest. Roused from sleep, he would go out in his striped pyjamas and wearing a hairnet which he refused to go to bed without, even if he was dead sick. The irate ‘visitor’ would proceed to shower him with a tirade of abuse. ‘Do please calm down, Mr Karić, we’ll sort it all out,’ the father repeated. As he led the ‘guest’ into the house, he’d glance up at the first-floor window and see his son peering down into the courtyard through the curtains. When their eyes met, the father would smile, letting his son know that he forgave him and would take the blame for everything himself. The boy would run into the hall, and time and time again he heard his father enduring insults and excusing his son’s escapades, which had long since grown into full-blown scandals. The yob and the rake in him came out ever stronger. When he turned twenty, old Karić the neighbour yelled at his father in the kitchen just like he had ten years earlier when the boy had broken the apple tree he’d climbed to steal the fruit. Now the boy had got Karić’s daughter pregnant.
His father had sorted things out in the past, and he knew he’d sort them out now, too. After showing Karić out, the father went up to his son’s room and gave him a homily which was supposed to be soul-stirring. He spoke about the power of love and forgiveness and appealed to the debt of responsibility we have towards others. After this sermon, which was futile and thus tragic, he kissed his son on both cheeks and went to the mosque, bowed with sorrow as if he bore it on his back. His son must have thought it would be the same story that day when old Karić dashed to their house and demanded that he marry his daughter.
All this I gleaned from the flurry of anecdotes about the son who killed his father, which partly stemmed from memory and were partly dreamed up by people as they went to read the green obituary notice on the wall of the mosque. The son had promised his father that he’d marry the girl, people said, but that was another lie: one day before the wedding he’d fled to America. His father reached him in New York, where he was working in a restaurant run by a compatriot, and told him he had to come home because the girl was pregnant and would soon be giving birth. She hadn’t had an abortion because he couldn’t countenance such a sin. The girl kept the child because the father promised Karić his son would return and marry her. But his son hung up and fled to the other end of America, even farther away from the past. He even made it as far as Los Angeles, only to receive word there that the girl had given birth to a son and, after leaving hospital, had drowned herself and the baby in Bojana River. In order to avenge the disgrace brought upon his family, old Karić went down to the quay that night and killed his would-be son-in-law’s brother – a boy of just ten. And as the father held the bloodstained body of his youngest son in his arms, Karić came up and spat on him.
‘If you’d’ve killed that rotter when you should’ve, this good‘un would still be alive,’ Karić said, and with tears in his eyes he fell to his knees before the dead boy. He wept convulsively, kissed the boy’s hand and repeated the sad refrain over and over like a scratched record: Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me…
‘This is all because of you. It’s all your fault,’ Karić flung at the father as he was being handcuffed and bundled into a police car.
At that moment I realised all the things I miss, all the fascinating stories I don’t get to hear, because I refuse to mix with people on principle. People said the son had already been taken to Montenegro’s largest jail in Spuž. The inspector who questioned him now sits in his office for hours, drinking, and doesn’t speak a word to anyone, they say. But word had already leaked out to willing listeners in the pub next to the police station about what the son said at his questioning, and now the whole town knows the story: I killed him because he forgave me.
When he heard that his brother had been killed because of his sin, the son decided to go home for the punishment he felt he had long since deserved. ‘I loved my brother more than myself,’ people claimed he said. ‘As much as I’ve hated myself all my life, I truly loved my brother,’ he allegedly uttered, not caring about the obvious contradictoriness of the statement. In any case, the son returned and stood in front of his father. ‘Kill me now at last,’ he said. But his father embraced him and burst into tears. ‘My son, now you’re all I have left. Promise me, swear to me by the grave of your brother, that you’ll never leave me again,’ his father beseeched him.
The police counted twelve stab wounds on the father’s body when they responded to the son’s call and the words I’ve killed my father. He waited for them in the hall, still holding the bloodstained kitchen knife in his hand. When he was questioned he admitted everything. ‘I have just one condition,’ he said. ‘I want the death penalty.’
He told them that he’d only come back to Ulcinj to be punished. He returned because he believed his father would kill him for all the evil he’d caused. Taking his own life would have been an option if he’d had the courage, but he admitted he had always been a coward. So he came for the punishment he desperately wanted. Instead, he received forgiveness and couldn’t stand it anymore. That’s why he killed his father – because he hoped the law would be merciless and someone would finally kill him in return. He admitted everything but demanded the death penalty. ‘All my life I’ve just wanted punishment,’ he said. ‘I committed every new crime in retaliation for not being punished for the previous one. My father forgave me for everything and that made my life hell,’ the son cried before the bewildered police officers. ‘You don’t know how hard it is to live without punishment, how terrible the world is when there’s nothing but forgiveness on the horizon.’ After all I’d heard, I found I had the deepest sympathy for him.
Reflecting on how our parents constantly grind us down and destroy us whatever they do, through their very existence, just as we grind them down and destroy them through our very existence, I went into one of Ulcinj’s myriad cafés and ordered a double whisky at the bar. But I didn’t get to drink it in peace because Dirty Djuro came up to me and offered me sex with one of his daughters: ‘Just 15 euros for a blow job, just 25 for the real thing.’
Interpersonal relations are a nightmare from which there’s no waking up, I thought to myself.
Djuro came to town as a refugee back when the war in Croatia began. He claimed he could repair various appliances and even offered to do it on the cheap. People are miserly and therefore they chose to believe him. It took a few years for them to realise that Djuro never repaired anything for anyone. He’d arrive at a house like an ill omen, called by a householder determined to save money. If Djuro was supposed to fix the fridge, he would remove the motor, and then also offer to ‘repair’ perfectly functional water heaters, irons and vacuum cleaners. He took a piece out of every appliance and promised to come back the next day with new parts, insert them and reassemble everything he’d dismantled. After he left a house, nothing in it worked anymore. And he did all this damage for just half the price of what tradesmen charged for repairing a single fridge.
As a consequence, not one day went past when he didn’t get a beating. Around town, he’d run into the miserly numskulls whose houses he’d devastated and whose appliances remained unfixed because in the meantime he’d sold the parts he removed. The fellow would beat the living daylights out of Djuro, and no sooner had he got to his feet and brushed the dust off, he’d fall to the ground again, bloodied by the blows of one of the local repairmen furious at having their prices undercut and their customers taken away. In the end there was no more work for Djuro, but by then his daughters had grown up and he realised he could earn money on their budding, increasingly curvaceous bodies.
They called him Dirty because his clothes were always slimy like the cassocks of Orthodox priests. And because he pimped his daughters. But whatever people thought of him, they had to admit he was endowed with entrepreneurial spirit. He started business with two of his daughters. The elder, sixteen-year-old Tanja, he advertised as a buxom blonde who swallows. The younger, Zorana, who had her first john on her fourteenth birthday, was sold as a tight, small-breasted brunette. Later, his third daughter, Mirjana, came of working age and ran as a sweet anal fantasy.
Djuro stuck to his low-price policy in prostitution too. He drove a rusted red Moskvich with Dirty Djuro & Daughters: Sex for Every Pocket painted on the side. Half an hour later we drove up to his flat in this rattletrap, looking like something out of a bad film. The old pervert had detected straight away that I was easy prey. ‘Talk about horny – two more whiskys and you’d even do me! Luckily there are beauties like my daughters,’ he told me.
They lived in a cellar converted into a two-room flat. A narrow corridor led from there to the business premises – a three-room brothel. The door was opened for us by Djuro’s wife, a gap-toothed old lady with breasts worn out from feeding the horde of children who gambolled about the flat like a litter of puppies. Her face spoke of a great weariness and the desire for an early death. I was wondering what was left for a mother of three, four or five children, when suddenly two more appeared, making a total of seven. When someone multiplies life to such an extent, even if they don’t understand it, they at least feel its worthlessness. Children are like money: the more of it you print, the more of them you bear, the less they’re worth.
This hyperinflation of children hampered our forward progress through Djuro’s flat. As soon as the children saw me, they ran towards me. The burliest of them, and thus the most dangerous, grabbed me by my trousers with chocolate-smeared hands. Another knelt in front of me and cried, announcing a demand I didn’t understand and which obviously had nothing to do with me anyway. A third, the smallest one, bit into my shoe.
‘Don’t worry, he’s just teething,’ Djuro told me. ‘Follow me, I’ll take you to Tanja.’
I carefully shook off the ankle-biter, not wanting to break his milk teeth, and headed after Djuro.
‘Look, I’ve made sure that each has her own room,’ he said. He wanted me to know that he was a devoted father. They were young women now and needed to have intimacy. Besides, he added, there was no need to economise on space because he’d made a good deal with the tenants. In return for being able to use the whole cellar, the family offered them sex for free.
‘They’re all old men and don’t want it more than once a month,’ he confided in me. ‘And imagine: there are some who want my wife. You can give them beauties like my daughters, but the old farts want my wife – that old walrus!’ he sniggered.
We went into Tanja’s room. She was lying on the bed in black underwear. I noticed that her knickers were frayed at the edges. She pursed her fleshy, shoddily made-up lips in an effort to look sensual. The bra holding her enormous breasts was smeared with sperm. I handed Djuro the money and pushed him out of the room.
‘I’ve had my eye on you for a while,’ Tanja said. ‘But I didn’t make any advances because I thought: a cool cat like him can have any woman he wants, so why would he pay for me?’
‘Very flattering of you,’ I mumbled and tried to have a look around the room. But she hadn’t finished.
‘You’d be surprised if you knew how many well-to-do, handsome men come to see me.’
‘Believe me, I’m not surprised,’ I told her.
‘But it’s clever ones like you who turn me on the most,’ she purred, looking me in the eyes.
We find a bent for the intellectual in the most unexpected of places, I thought. Everyone is driven by the eternal Why: the physicist in a Zürich laboratory, the art historian in the Vatican Library and the whore in Ulcinj. They’re all equally far from, and thus equally close to, an answer: it’s just as appropriate and legitimate to seek answers in atoms, books or smelly provincial phalluses. Therefore, everyone has equal right to intellectual snobbery – or rather no right – and everyone pondering the questions of existence is equally laughable.
I was blessed by an interruption in the conversation because Tanja now devoted herself to her ritual of cleansing. Leaning over the washstand, she soaped up the coves of her armpits and then the fjord between her legs. She hummed a cheerful melody; I think it was Put on something folky, let’s do the pokey-pokey. Finally, I had time to study her room.
On the camp bed, leaning against the metal bars, was a teddy bear. It faced a pink pillow in the shape of a heart. Beneath the bed I saw an open book; something by Virginia Woolf. Probably A Room of One’s Own. Tanja tried to satisfy as broad a target group as possible, I said to myself. The camp bed was for the sadists, the teddy bear and the pink pillow were to please the paedophiles, and the book was for intellectuals like me but could also come in handy for slapping the masochists. Djuro’s family left nothing to coincidence – it was a well-organised, carefully thought-out, proper little family business.
That’s what I thought until I saw the photo on the wall above Tanja’s bed. It was of her and her father, embracing and smiling. They were standing on the terrace above Mala Plaža beach with the open sea behind them on a fine spring day: the air was clean and radiant, and the world was steeped in a blue we otherwise see only in toilet-cleaner ads. Djuro hugged his daughter around the neck, laughing and kissing her hair. One of her arms hung around his waist. She was looking up at her father, and he was leaning down towards her. Her eyes were full of adoration and love in just the way that young women in the paintings of the Old Masters look up into the sky, searching for God, or at least the saints. She really must love her father, I thought. Ten minutes beforehand she’d had sex with a man who her father pimped her to. And it wasn’t hard to imagine that he’d take her off for another fat toad of a man to lie on, straight after the photo was taken. Her father had made a whore of her and ruined any chance of her ever being anything else, at least in a small town like this where everyone knows everything and nothing is ever forgotten. She was forever doomed to be a cheap whore, thanks to her father. For as long as she lived she would put out to old men and pimply teenagers because that was the only future she had: ever-worse customers and ever-lower prices. And then death in contempt and loneliness, if she didn’t get AIDS first or some maniac cut her throat or suffocated her with a pillow. All that because of her father. Yet despite all that, she looked up at him with a love which couldn’t be faked.
I left the room in a hurry. Traversing the kitchen in the greatest urgency, I was waylaid by Djuro.
‘Let me introduce you: this is my mysterious son Petar. “Why mysterious?” you may ask yourself,’ he blathered, although I was only asking myself how to flee that cellar as quickly as possible.
I breathed with difficulty because I suddenly became aware of the claustrophobic quality of the space around me, and that feeling merged with a growing rage inside me.
‘He’s mysterious because no-one knows who his father is,’ Dirty Djuro guffawed. ‘Look at him: a donkey of sixteen, a handsome lad, but he doesn’t look like his father – his alleged father, I should say,’ Djuro snarled and spat.
Then he grabbed the lad by the ears.
‘As to who his father is, you’ll have to ask my wife. I only know he’s not mine. Either my wife is a whore or he was sent by God to test me, like Father Bogdan said. I don’t believe in God, but I fear Him. So I say to myself: in case this is some kind of test, I’d better tolerate the little guy till he grows up. One more mouth to feed? I won’t even notice. But just look at him –,’ he shouted and grabbed the lad by the genitals, ‘talk about well hung, eh? Anyway, I’ve done my part of the deal with God: if this is His child, then I’ve been good to him like a real father… ‘
I heard the tail-end of Djuro’s theological dilemma as I fled from the cellar where that big happy family lived in harmony and love. I hurried to make it back to my car because I couldn’t spend a second longer amid the river of flesh pouring towards the promenade and the cafés. These were anthills emitting turbofolk music and the beastly odour of humans ready to copulate. And so I desperately strove against the current of the Styx, which was dragging me back into that seething human crowd. I felt I was sinking in a human multitude like a person going under. Drowning in humanity – what a terrible way to go!
Somehow I made it to the pavement and leaned, panting, against a pole to catch my breath, finally out of harm’s way. ‘Hey mate!’ I heard and flinched. ‘My old friend!’ the voice went on, and now a heavy hand was laid on my shoulder. I stared at those fingers with skin as rough as the bark of a centennial tree and as thick and knotted as Montenegrin mountain sausages. Each of those fingers seemed strong enough to squash the life out of me, but I wasn’t afraid of them at all, nor was I afraid of the wielder of such powerful and at the same time absurd fingers. Everything is equally absurd, even that which kills us. We realise that as soon as we overcome our fear of what threatens to destroy us. I laughed, gazing at the grime under the giant fingernails. I was amused by the thought that anyone could kill me, even a man who doesn’t use nail clippers – someone so primitive that he doesn’t even clean under his nails.
‘It’s you, mate!’ yelled the giant, who was now standing in front of me. I measured him from head to foot. What I saw was a six-foot-something, 300-pound hulk, his shaggy hair encrusted with cement – so he’s a building worker, I thought, and with bloodshot eyes in a yellow face – so he’s an alcoholic with a destroyed liver. His cheap, tattered jeans and worn-out army boots, in which he seemed to step-dance in front of me, only confirmed the sad sketch I’d made out at first glance.
The colossus evidently knew me. As if that wasn’t compromising enough for me already, he expected me to recognise him. ‘It’s me, Uroš!’ he shouted, making all the passers-by turn and look at us, like we were game-show contestants and they were the crowd, allowed to be malicious spectators of my humiliation.
Uroš was an unlucky wretch I went to school with until Year 8. After years of daily abuse, the gang of kids set on him by arch-bully Žarko Primorac broke both his arms. Uroš’s dim-witted parents were determined for their son to have the education they didn’t, but this event finally made them decide to take him out of school, and by all indications he didn’t re-enrol. Uroš was my best, or, if you like, my only school friend. The day they broke his arms I was standing in the corner of the schoolyard like I did every day. I munched away at my hamburger and watched the ever-bloodthirsty onlookers form a circle around Primorac’s bully boys and Uroš, whom they spat on and kicked every day. I never said a word in his defence, and obviously I never ran up to offer help. I’d just eat my lunch and wait until the mob had had enough of inflicting torment and humiliation and split up. Uroš would wipe the blood from his face and come over to sit next to me. He never blamed me or expected me to do anything for him.
Now he did. He expected, even insisted, that we go and sit in a nearby café and have a drink. When people grow up they lose the few good traits they had as kids, I thought. That’s why we’re always disappointed when we meet long-lost childhood friends. Friendship is ultimately only possible in childhood because the concept of it demands a naivety which only childhood can ensure. Only children and idiots can have friends. That’s a word that goes together with an exuberant ta-da-da-da! Who else, other than children and idiots (i.e. the larger part of humanity) could believe there exist people so noble and good that we could believe them, confide our innermost thoughts and feelings in them and expect their help when things take a turn for the worse, which in all honesty things always do. If someone manages to cultivate what they consider a lifelong friendship, that merely means the friendship hasn’t been properly put to the test. There’s no friendship which won’t crumble beneath the weight of a friend’s bad character or the weight of evil, which all people are condemned to carry in their very core due to the very nature of being human.
‘So how are you doing, my old friend?’ Uroš yelled.
Seeing as he’d interrupted me in contemplation, he deserved for me to be ruthless, so I replied, ‘Sorry, but I was just thinking about something. Be quiet for ten minutes, remember what you wanted to say and tell me later.’ And good old Uroš really did fall silent. He guzzled his beer and grinned, evidently managing to convince himself that he was glad to see me. When people resolve to be good-hearted you can do what you want with them – it’s simply impossible to offend them. And that’s fair enough. To be good-hearted means to transcend oneself and to rise above one’s own nature, therefore so-called ‘good people’ use their ‘goodness’ to create an unforgettable pleasure for themselves, one of the most profound a person can feel. They enjoy their own goodness to such an extent that the rest of us have no obligations towards them whatsoever. In fact, the worse we behave towards them, the greater is their goodness towards us, and thus the pleasure they’re rewarded with is also greater.
‘Well then, Uroš, how’s life treating you?’ I said when I’d finally resolved to speak to him.
‘Pretty well,’ he replied. ‘Can’t complain.’
In the first few years after his parents had taken him out of school he refused to leave the farm and go into town, he told me.
‘You know, I was really offended by what Primorac and his guys did to me,’ he said almost apologetically, as if he was telling me amazing things I’d find hard to believe. ‘I felt kind of humiliated. Things were fine on the farm. But in town I might run into one of my old school friends.’ Those were his words, school friends. ‘I forgave them, but I never wanted to see them again. That’s why I avoided town.’
Then the war broke out. His father told him to enlist in the army to go and fight in Bosnia.
‘And that’s what I did,’ he said, and I believed him.
That’s just like him, I thought – he never used to ask any questions.
‘I killed a few people in the war. Later it gave me sleepless nights, but over time you get used to things,’ he explained, and went on to present his pitiable philosophy of life. ‘I always forgive myself. Whatever you do, you always accept yourself again afterwards, isn’t that right? Each of us does terrible things which we’re mortally ashamed of, but we keep on living. That’s why I wasn’t angry at the guys who bashed me up back at school – I knew all the bad things I’d done, and if I forgive myself it’s only fair that I forgive them. To think badly of others you have to think well of yourself, and I can’t do that. I know myself pretty well and I know I’m no better than others.’
He killed during the war, but he stayed in the background whenever he was ordered to burn houses and rape women, he told me.
‘I hid then, I must admit, but I’m no coward. When there was shooting, I fired like the others. But I couldn’t do anything to the women. I felt sorry for them and simply couldn’t do it with them. Others did, but not me. Maybe it was because I myself was maltreated as a boy. Could that have been it?’ he asked me.
He returned home. The next winter his parents married him off, and he and his wife came to live in town.
‘In Ulcinj we had it better than in the country. Now that I had a wife I was sort of proud and didn’t care what others thought of me,’ he said.
Sometimes he’d run into those who’d abused him. Some of them looked at him with a derisive smile, others with shame. One of those he met was Žarko Primorac.
‘He came up to me, and God was he friendly! He invited me for a few drinks. After we’d had two or three he started apologising,’ Uroš told me. ‘We were at the bar for a long time that evening. And he cried, man did he cry! In the end I took him home to my place, and all the way he held my hand. He gripped it like a vice, as if he was hanging over an abyss and my hand was the last thing for him to cling to. And he didn’t let go of it until I promised we’d see each other again.
‘When my son was born, Primorac became the godfather. He was always considerate of my Miloš. He never forgot a single birthday, Easter or Christmas, and would always come with presents,’ Uroš said. ‘To tell the truth, I’d never have been able to buy him things like that, so let his godfather, I thought. If I, his father, work on a building site from dawn till dusk just to make ends meet, let him have toys from Primorac if that’s the only way he can have them. The boy’s got it hard enough because of my poverty, and it’s not his fault.
‘Then I had a chance to go and work in Nigeria for six months,’ he said, as if it had been a lucky break. ‘I slaved my guts out like here, but at least the money was better. When I came back I took a taxi home. The whole boot was crammed full of presents – both for her and for Miloš. Now I’m going to give them something nice for a change, I thought. All the presents from Primorac have made my son like him more than he likes his own father.
‘Nena, the old landlady, was waiting in the courtyard. She burst into tears when she saw me,’ Uroš said. ‘I asked her what was wrong and where my family was, but she didn’t answer. She just cried and said My good Uroš over and over again. Where’s my wife? I asked her. I wanted to go into the house, but Nena stood in front of me and wouldn’t let me in. You no longer have a family or a home, my good Uroš, she told me.
‘So, old mate, my wife had left me. And who with? With Primorac the godfather, of course, and she took our son with her. They didn’t even wait a week after I’d gone, Nena told me. They got up early one morning, packed their things before dawn so the neighbours wouldn’t see, hopped in the van and were gone. They didn’t call anyone, so no-one knows where they went. I looked for them for a while but then gave up. I drank my Nigerian pay – it had only brought me bad luck anyway. And may it be the death of you, I said to myself. I didn’t leave the bar until I’d drunk away the very last dollar. There’s no way, mate – if you live all your life with nothing, you’ll end up with nothing. And if I had anything but straw in my head, I would’ve known that money isn’t for me. I had everything except for money. Then I went after money and lost everything,’ he said.
He didn’t blame anyone except himself, he added, and he forgave both his wife and Primorac. He only missed his son. But he hoped that Miloš would come and look for him one day. He hoped he’d remember his old dad when he grew up and, wherever he was now, that he’d return to Ulcinj to see him, if only for a day. Yet Uroš still knew that nothing mattered and it was all the same – a phrase which had become the refrain of his life.
‘You know, I’ve thought a lot about everything. I’ve had the time,’ he said laughing. ‘I mean, what else are you going to do when you’re left all alone? I thought a lot, and in the end I realised it’s all the same. And if I hadn’t run into Žarko Primorac in the street that day, and if he hadn’t shouted me drinks, and if we’d drunk by the glass and not by the bottle, and if I hadn’t felt sorry for him when he cried, and if I hadn’t promised we’d see each other again, and if I hadn’t taken him home to my place, where he met my wife – it still would have been all the same, because everything would’ve been up shit creek anyway.
‘Even if Žarko Primorac had had one ounce of decency in him, which he didn’t, and if he’d remembered that he’d already done me ill enough for the rest of my life – after all, they carried me out of school with broken arms, and because of him I never went back – and if he’d remembered that that sentenced me to mix cement and cast concrete for the rest of my life, and if he’d realised that it was he who destroyed any chance of me ever being more than a day labourer, which he didn’t, and if that had made him think I’ll never do him harm again, which it didn’t, and if everything had turned out differently, it would still be all the same.
‘The Devil would’ve found a way of fleecing me, I realised in the end, because I’ve never had any luck, and never will have,’ he said. ‘Whatever I do, it’ll be all the same – I’ll croak it alone, and the last thing that’ll pass through my head will be: Die properly now, and may all the misfortune die with you!
‘Miloš can come and see me, and maybe his biggest wish when he grows up will be to see his father. But what will he see? A shabby, dirty drunkard with a scraggly beard who sleeps in derelict workers’ huts, washes once a month, eats every second day and is dying of a bleeding liver because he’s had his fill of every kind of poison in this life: from what you drink in the bar because you want to and what you down every day because you have to – because others say you must. What should Miloš do? If he comes and sees me like this, I’ll die of shame that my son has seen how wretched I am. And if he doesn’t come, I’ll die of shame that not even my own son cares about me. Whatever’s in store, it’s all the same to me. Just like it’s all the same to him, too. If he comes, he’ll be haunted by shame until his dying day because of what his father was like. If he doesn’t come, regret will catch up with him: he’ll remember the day that his father died and he didn’t go to see him, and he’ll feel ashamed because of it. Whatever he does, he’ll be dogged by misfortune, just like everything I ever did was plagued by misfortune. And so you see, my friend, that’s why nothing matters to me.’
I thought for a moment that I should pay for our drinks because I’m rich, after all, and he’s poor. But I let him pay because it was all the same, just like he said. We should never prevent people from putting their money where their mouth is. Although he had to turn his pockets inside out to find enough money to pay with, he was in good spirits when he left.
‘I’m glad to have met you again,’ he said, and was gone before I could answer.
Actually, I’d really wanted to tell him an edifying and comforting story, something about the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. It always soothes me to think of Bernhard because we cannot but feel comfort when we hear of others’ misfortune being greater than our own. If I’d managed to tell Uroš about Bernhard, he would have gone to sleep happy that night. Because I would have told him that the story teaches us an important thing: that human misfortune is always the same and equally possible everywhere. A starving farmer in the paddy fields of Asia and a depressive writer languidly chewing Sachertorte and sipping Julius Meinl coffee in a Viennese café have equal reason to be unhappy. We have equally good reason to be unhappy, he and I, because human misfortune doesn’t derive from a social system or a geographical location, but from existence itself. Simply to be somewhere is reason enough to be unhappy. Actually, it’s enough just to be. I’d tell him that others have also been cast into life, just like we have, and condemned to an existence we didn’t want, just like us. It was like that both for him, who had to walk to school from his village in worn-out shoes, and for me, who was driven to school by his father every morning in the Mercedes bought with his uncle’s money. Both for him, who went hungry all through school, and for me, who knew that but never offered to buy him a stupid school lunch. Both for him and for Žarko Primorac, who paid the ever-hungry and venal proletarian children with doughnuts and pastries so they’d abuse Uroš in the schoolyard, and do it during the break so that his humiliation was public and visible to all, and thus all the more terrible for him. Both for him and Žarko Primorac, and for me, who never ran up to offer help. And for the suckers who’d bolt down the food Primorac bought them, wipe their mouths on their sleeves and get down to the job. They bashed Uroš mercilessly although they had nothing against him. But they beat him diligently to make sure their boss was satisfied and would buy them delicacies the next day, too. If Primorac hadn’t found Uroš particularly repugnant and if it hadn’t been for his sadistic urge to abuse and humiliate him, they’d never have eaten chocolate-filled doughnuts in their impoverished early years. Uroš did suffer, but they got the doughnuts they’d craved for every day of their hungry childhoods. Yep, that’s probably what they think of when people say every cloud has a silver lining. He and I do, too, to the same degree. If he’d just let me tell him that, he’d have been able to realise how comforting it is.
But Uroš undoubtedly saw I was unhappy. He had to see it because the first thing people think when they meet me is: God, how unhappy that man is. That’s why he said ‘I’m glad to have met you again’. He probably said the same thing to Primorac when he went boozing with him, I thought, because it was clear that Primorac was unhappy too. How great is the joy of those who envied us our apparent childhood happiness when they meet us as adults and see that life has made us just as unhappy as them. Life levels us all in misfortune and despair, and every advantage we once had turns against us. But it drives those deprived of all chances, like Uroš, beyond rage and bitterness, and they end up in shame. Instead of being resentful towards others and towards life itself, he awaits the end in shame. Ultimately, Uroš, who was abused by Primorac, could find consolation solely in the fact that life maltreated Primorac too. Each of us is both an executioner and a victim – everyone abuses everyone else. The sadist will come to feel like a martyr sooner or later, and a martyr who lives long enough will also commit contemptible acts which will ensure lasting notoriety. There was nothing else for tormented Primorac to do but to enjoy the feeling of once having been the one who abused: he remembered that when he encountered Uroš. That’s why he was so glad to have met him again. That meeting of executioner and victim was to their mutual satisfaction, which is a real rarity in the rich and complex history of executioner and victim, so fraught with negative emotions.
I thought about Uroš as I cruised through town in my car. The rough road took me up to the TV transmitter on Pinješ Hill. I stopped the car and sat there, sipping my whisky and looking at the lights of the town. I located the CD I’d burned for moments of particular desperation. It had two tracks on it – John Walker’s Blues by Steve Earle and Leif Erikson by Interpol – and I played them over and over until I’d emptied the bottle.
That’s why I dipped into humanity again: to buy more blasted whisky. That was the only reason for socialising that night. I bought two flasks of Glenfiddich, sat in front of the supermarket and downed several fiery gulps. The golden fluid would flow and I’d find the strength to move back to the car.
But it seemed that not even such a simple plan could be achieved. However little we expect of life, it gives us even less. Disappointment is inevitable, and not even the complete absence of hope can free us of it. I only wanted to drink whisky and then run away home. Instead, I was forced into a conversation with Samir the Wahabi.
I could see him striding towards me like a harbinger of doom. He came straight at me, and the people he bumped into on the way were flung back as if they’d hit a brick wall. If there could be an Islamic comic superhero, some kind of Arabian Hulk, it would look like him, I remember thinking. Even while he was still some way off, I saw he was yelling at me and waving his index finger threateningly.
Samir was usually harmless. You would find him standing around town with his thick black beard and funny white crocheted cap. He was a bogeyman for infidels on his gnarled legs, whose lankiness was further emphasised by the baggy, three-quarter pants he wore. Ranting and raving, he warned the people of Ulcinj about sin and doom. He was therefore considered a local loony, one of many. Samir had once been a promising young talent, a brilliant pianist, whose rendition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations had brought him to the cusp of fame. He was invited to study piano at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, which he accepted, and the people of Ulcinj saw him as a ‘local boy made good’ who had a great future ahead of him, predicting that he was sure to become one of the world’s leading pianists. But just two years later he came back. Some said he’d been raped: that a group of students had abused him on the piano and then whipped him with conductor’s batons as he staggered, bleeding from the anus, all the way from the recital hall back to the dorm. Others spoke of an Austrian girl he’d been due to marry. They loved each other and were happy, until one evening she was found hanging from an oak tree in front of the Mozarteum. According to that story, she wrote in a farewell letter that she’d chosen to die because her parents wouldn’t allow her to marry him, and she wouldn’t marry any other. Apparently, the letter was sewed to her belly with red thread and stated I’m leaving, my love, and taking our unborn child with me, but the abundance of details made that version seem less convincing.
Whatever really happened, Samir sought consolation in the mosque. The fingers which had once flown over the piano keys now turned the pages of the Koran. What Austria hadn’t given him, he now received from Saudi Arabia. People could scoff at Samir while he stood at the traffic lights berating and Koran-bashing them, and they also felt pity for him. But I envied him, because the only truly happy person is the zealot prepared to put everything on the line for what they believe. Of course, what we believe reveals itself as a lie in the end, and what we were prepared to give everything for turns out not to have been worth a thing, not even something as trifling as our life. But that disappointment comes later. Before it grips us, before reason sets in and the tide demolishes the sandcastle we’ve placed all our hopes in, the moments of happiness we live are the only ones we will have. I never had that hope, and that’s why I envied Samir. One moment of blind faith in anything, even in the most utter nonsense, brings a person more happiness than all the reason and knowledge in the world; for reason and knowledge do nothing but destroy any possibility of happiness and reveal everything we’ve tried to link our life to as worthless. That’s why we float like balloons, bloated to bursting point with reason, just waiting for the moment when one tiny extra bit of knowledge will blow us to smithereens – when our body, as fragile as the membrane of a balloon, explodes from the despair which fills us.
When he stood in front of me and sent me what must have been his best reproachful look, I finally understood what he was saying to me.
‘You’d better put away that bottle!’ he commanded. ‘Don’t bring more evil upon yourself. I can see there’s more than enough of it in you already. Don’t you know it’s forbidden to consume alcohol?’
‘Of course, but not for me – I’m not a Muslim,’ I said.
‘I know very well who you are,’ Samir replied. (Why not come out and say he knows everything about me? I thought.) ‘I know that your great-grandfather was an Orthodox priest, and that’s why I’m appealing to you – because the Bible also forbids alcohol.’
I tried to explain to him that I’m a non-Christian to the same extent that I’m a non-Muslim, as well as telling him that all I knew about my great-grandfather was that he was an idiot who plunged his family into misery with his religion. Nothing that Samir had to say from now until eternity was of any interest to me, so I asked him politely to go away and leave me in peace. He replied that he saw evil in me, that even among the throng in town that night he could see evil radiating from me.
Then all at once he changed his tone. He calmed down, pulled up one of the Coca-Cola crates and sat next to me.
‘I’m whispering because they’re everywhere around us. I can see them following you like they follow me,’ he said.
We sat on crates there in front of the supermarket: one of us drunk on alcohol and the other with religion, but both with a vision of evil and ruin around him. Samir told me he believed we were both being pursued by spirits. He claimed they were called djinns.
He spoke eloquently and what he said was not uninteresting, but it certainly was threatening. As we know, the only things we take seriously are those which threaten us.
‘Allah, blessed be His name, said: We made the djinns of scorching fire. According to some it was the fire of lightning, others say it was the fire of the sun,’ Samir explained.
Then he demanded that I reject the image of the world I have.
‘There is no one single reality. Reality is tiered and consists of three worlds: material, psychic and spiritual,’ he declared mechanically. ‘The djinns live between this world, where you and I are now, and the world of pure spirit – they’re denizens of the psychic world,’ he said, tapping his finger against his forehead.
‘The djinns have no permanent shape and can therefore take any form. They have a soul and therefore, like man, are responsible to Allah. Some of the djinns are on the right path and are Muslims. Others are forces of evil in the struggle against Allah. They lurk in the shadows waiting for us and are constantly assailing us,’ he told me, visibly agitated. ‘They attack me when I’m praying, just like they attack you when you’re drinking. But I defend myself again and again, while you give in to them.
‘Sometimes you can hear them at night and it sounds like they’re romping around your bed. Sometimes they look like ghosts, other times like dogs. Beware of the black dogs in particular! The Prophet said: The black dog is a Devil! Were dogs not a species of creature, I should command that they all be killed. But I am afraid to kill a whole species. Even so: kill all black dogs because they are djinns. Those were the words of the Prophet,’ Samir claimed.
I learnt from him that evening that being unclean, both physically and spiritually, opened the door to the djinns. When I masturbated I flung the door wide open to evil, he warned me, and I realised that it would be hard for me to ever close it again! According to Samir, masturbation was a call to evil to take us over. When it did, there was only one way to expel it: by turning to what is holy. He explained that the djinns flee from the holy, just as they flee from light and water.
‘What is dark must be made light, and what is impure must be cleansed.’ With that he abruptly got up and, without looking back, vanished among the crowd of people who were unaware of the danger awaiting them and lived their lives open for evil.
My good Samir, I thought as I lurched off towards the car: everyone is evil and everyone is a liar. As long as you search for evil around you, you’re blind to the evil within, and everything is inside you.
That’s how my father used to speak to me. He’d sit in his armchair on the terrace for hours, as if petrified, and read Saint Augustine’s Confessions. If he hadn’t moved his hand from time to time, just to turn the page, you really would have thought he’d turned to stone. He sought refuge in that immobility, erecting barricades against everything around him, and whenever he said anything it felt like a stony monument was addressing me. He only spoke words of warning and censure because his self-seclusion and hermit-like asceticism evidently gave him the strength to judge me. This was only possible because he’d never been strong enough to pass judgement on himself – he’d always been weak and indecisive. In the end, he fled beneath the skirts of Saint Augustine, read him, and assumed the pose of a statue of him. Surely he can’t have thought that would be sufficient for his salvation; surely he can’t have seen a salutary transcendental and a vertical in it, to use his words.
‘You can’t run and hide – all your holy-roller stuff is in vain because none of it is real,’ I yelled at him. ‘There’s only torment, for which you’re too weak. Some flee from it into death and decay, and some into religion, which also ultimately leads to death and decay. There’s only the torment, from which you all flee; and there’s me, determined to endure every little bit of the agony I’ve been granted for as long as I exist,’ I shouted.
He pointed a trembling finger at me and muttered his Augustine: You are one of those who live their life ever destroying and never creating; all that is good comes from God, and all evil from human freedom to choose.
That was our last quarrel. I left him on the terrace with Bach playing on the gramophone and Augustine in his hands, all alone in that empty house which he filled with the transcendental after my mother died. We told each other all we had to say and then I left him for good. Since then, we’ve known nothing about each other, just as we knew nothing of each other before. We’ve felt nothing but antipathy for each other and yet we regretted that things had to be this way. Regretted that we never really had a chance for love to grow between us.
The fastest and least unpleasant way back to the car led through the abandoned underground car park. From there I knew I’d be able to squeeze my way through the row of ramshackle houses to the park, and then walk up the alleyways to Pinješ Hill, where I’d parked the car. The risk of running into someone I didn’t want to meet, if we abstract from the fact that I never want to meet anyone, was minimal. This shortcut to the car led round the back of the multitude thronging in their own sweat and stench on the promenade in search of summer amusements. It led through the dark beyond the reach of the street lights, under which tens of thousands of people bobbed and collided in their mindless trajectories like a disarrayed army of ants trundling the same streets as they did every evening, every summer.
Near the deserted Socialist-era supermarket, there was a car park from which a broad staircase led underground. The Communist leaders, recruited from the impoverished proletariat and simple-minded peasantry, made up for their modest origins by hatching megalomaniac plans for the future. They saw everything they built as their own tombstone – that which future generations would remember them by, because they believed in the idiotic idea that human life doesn’t end at death but endures through people’s deeds.
Once I read in the local paper that the car park with its three levels covered every bit of 100,000 square feet. This was not including the nuclear shelter, whose dimensions are unknown since the information is still treated as a military secret. The building would make a perfect vault or crypt, and I assume it would be possible to transfer the remains of all the Yugoslav Communist leaders there. In the process, the coffins of their immediate family members could also be brought to the shelter so that they could be together in death, too. The Yugoslav Marxists lived according to the maxim that the family is the basic building block of society, so it seemed appropriate that the same social organisation should be upheld in the afterlife, too.
But this gargantuan child was useless as a car park. When the weary tradesmen had completed the final construction tasks and the pig-faced municipal president cut the ribbon to declare the place open, no car could drive into it accompanied by the town sirens’ festive blare. The underground car park was ready but lacked a short stretch of access road. The newspapers of the time justified a car park which no cars could enter as being ‘part of the anticipated dynamic development of the town’. The car park was just the first step: the next five-year plan would see ‘construction of the road into and out of the car park, as well as a range of associated infrastructural facilities to enhance the attractiveness of the Ulcinj area as a tourist destination’. The municipal president delivered his vision of the future road in a speech to a meeting of the town’s youth. The gist of his argument went like this: if today’s generations went and built everything, meaning the car park and the access road, they’d run the risk of pampering generations to come. Just as their fathers had done a hard job by fighting for and winning the country’s freedom, they too had done a hard job by building the car park. Every new generation had it easier: half a century ago we had nothing; now we had our freedom and the car park; the access road was the only thing missing. These were his main points, and it revealed a glimpse of the future concept of development. The car park was evidently conceived as a story without end – an everlasting building site which every generation would contribute to until the end of the world.
In the meantime, however, the car park was a hole in the centre of town, where the local population disposed of their rubbish on a daily basis. And as I was going down the stairs into this notorious rubbish dump, I almost tripped over rusty television sets and fridges several times, along with piles of good old jumbo rubbish bags which the more environmentally conscious citizens dispose their refuse in. The light bulbs which had not yet been smashed by the local hooligans flickered in an effort to illuminate this mausoleum to the belief in progress.
The abandoned car park provided the inspiration for many local urban legends. It began with the story about a band of drug addicts who gathered under the town. Then a dead girl was found in the car park. She’d been raped, some said. Others claimed the killer had cut off both her hands before she died. The police ultimately reported that the girl had died from tumbling down the stairs, and that she’d tumbled down the stairs because she wanted to, and that she’d wanted to because she was the victim of a paedophile, incestuous father, which caused her to commit suicide and saw her father end up in jail. But before it irrefutably became a ‘family tragedy’, the case ran the gauntlet of neighbourhood gossip, with every teller of the story inserting some figment of their darkest desires and frustrations. They said the girl had been anally gang-raped. Or that she’d been forced to have oral sex, again with several men. Or that she was found with her eyes gouged out, which meant that suspicions were directed towards the Satanists. Or that her kidneys had been plucked out, which saw the blame being levelled at the human-organ traffickers who’d passed themselves off as an old married couple from Italy and managed to deceive their victims with the image of friendly, senile tourists travelling the impoverished European fringe to bring humanitarian aid to the local population. The dead girl was a blank slate, and the town testified to its own repulsiveness. Let people give free rein to their fantasies and hell will open up before you. A smelly sulphurous torrent of their thoughts will gush forth, full of slimy desires spawned from their souls like monstrously deformed infants; full of suppressed fears dredged up from that cemetery of bones and putrid corpses inside.
There were a few more fantasy murders as well as several real suicides down in the car park, which became a chasm into which the people of Ulcinj stuck everything they didn’t dare to say or even think, like in the fable about the emperor who had goat’s ears but banned anyone from saying so. But no hole is deep enough to accommodate all the evil of humanity. If someone managed to wring all the black out of just one human soul, like the ink from a squid, the whole world would disappear in murk. Only demented minds could split atoms and search with microscopes for the perfect weapon; just peer into one human being and you’ll find all that’s required to obliterate life on Earth.
When I was down in the car park I felt comfortable for the first time that evening. I’d always known there’s no place people can find happiness except underground. Up above me humanity raged, producing a clamour which penetrated even the thick reinforced concrete of the construction. The footsteps above my head sounded like tiny nails being hammered into the coffin I’d voluntarily entered. Alas, even below ground I wasn’t alone: one unpleasant surprise follows another – that’s the story of my life.
I sat on a heap of abandoned books at the nethermost point of the car park, in front of the giant steel doors of the nuclear shelter, and browsed through some of them. There was quite a collection of religious trash: One Hundred Ways to Attain Salvation, Interpreting God’s Signs and Self-Awareness. I lit a cigarette and looked attentively at the piles of rubbish around me. The harsh landscape of garbage is comforting, devoid as it is of promise, and thus of hope and subsequent disappointment. Everything around me was spent, disposed of and utterly forgotten, as if it had never existed. I sympathised with every one of the discarded domestic appliances, kitchen cabinets and light fixtures. Each of us awaits the same fate which befell them. People will use us and then forget us just like they used and forgot those objects. Intermittently, people are useful to us for some reason and so we bond with them. But the very next day, they bother us and we wish for nothing more than for them to vanish from our lives. Every day we discard people like we discard rubbish. We discard and will be discarded, that’s the simple truth. We’re cast into a world which constantly discards us. In the end we’re left alone with ourselves to wander the waste dump of our lives. All around us are discarded friends, lovers, and people good for one day; those we avoided and those we got rid of.
For a moment, I thought I saw the silhouette of a person between two old fridges. I told myself not to be ridiculous, that no-one had come here for years. The locals think the place is cursed, and tourists only come down for a pee or, in moments of great sexual urgency, to have an unfulfilling quickie. But they never come down this far. Whatever brings them here, they perform it at the base of the stairs, from where they still have a comforting glimpse of the world above them.
Despite the convincing argument I consoled myself with, the silhouette emerged from the darkness again. In front of me now stood a dark-skinned boy. He looked at me with a measured gaze, his eyes full of suspicion. Then he held out his hand to me, which I naturally took as an extremely hostile gesture.
The impertinence of beggars knows no bounds. They’re people who demand compassion from us again and again, despite them having none for others. They act as if there was no other misfortune in the universe apart from theirs. When a person dear to you dies and you drive the streets of the town in despair, waiting for the sedatives you’ve swallowed to take effect, you stop at the traffic lights and a beggar woman with a child pinned like a brooch to her flaccid breast will come up and ask you for money. What does she care for your suffering? She’s got enough of her own and is determined to get something in exchange for it. Even in the midst of the worst tragedy that could befall you, beggars will still stubbornly assail you, demanding that you pay them for their tragedy. And if a person, in their greatest despair, decided to end their life by jumping off a high-rise building, I’m sure the beggars would reach their hands out through the staircase windows and demand alms from the plummeting figure.
As if that wasn’t enough, beggars also unscrupulously exploit their physical deficiencies. Once at the traffic lights near the railway station in Podgorica, a Gypsy stuck his withered leg in through the open window of my car. I hadn’t noticed him as he came up, pulling himself along on his crutches. With the cool calmness of a hit man, he thrust his leg in through the window and kicked me in the face; his foot stank abominably. I hastily opened the door, knocking him back and into the adjacent lane, right in front of a truck which had stopped at the red light. With a bit of luck I was able to push the bastard beneath the moving vehicle. He got up onto his crutches again with amazing speed and came at me again, cursing. Fortunately, I had a can of Coca-Cola in the car, the perfect projectile, which I landed right between his evil little eyes. This time he hit the asphalt properly. In my rear-view mirror I saw the blood trickle from his forehead onto the asphalt. Later, when the police questioned me, they asked why I fled the ‘scene of the accident’, as they called it. I told them that the formulation ‘scene of the accident’ was quite inappropriate to my mind because the event had really made my day.
‘You fled because you didn’t have the courage to face up to what you did,’ the officer shouted.
I explained to him that I only drove away because the traffic lights had turned green and the impatient drivers behind me were blowing their horns, unwilling to let me revel in what I’d done and savour the sight of that miscreant bowled over backwards.
Now here I was, faced with another such situation; the boy with the outstretched hand edged towards me, step by cautious step. Uh-oh, I thought, a misfortune never comes alone: behind him several more beggars brazenly stepped forth from what I had considered the dark of non-existence. I counted them: there was one man, two women, and five children of indeterminable sex. Now that a whole family of beggars had appeared, I realised I’d better get out of there quickly. One of the women had a lump on her back the size of a mirror ball in your average disco, while the other’s face was wrapped in bandages embellished with bloodstains. Both of them were also lacking vital limbs; at least an arm and a leg each, I estimated at first glance. But their anatomic minimalism didn’t mean the effacement of all beauty, and I discerned something well-proportioned about their figures, a kind of pragmatic symmetry. One of the women lacked a left arm and a right leg, while the other lacked a right arm and a left leg, so the diagonal presence and diagonal absence of limbs intersected on their bodies. This symmetry, which my aesthetically trained eye immediately perceived, allowed them to move about with the aid of a single crutch. With it propped under their one arm, and hopping on their one leg, they could flit around with reasonable dexterity. If the absence of limbs had been vertical – if they’d lacked an arm and a leg on the same side of the body, say – getting about would have been much more difficult for them. That would have lessened my problem because I wouldn’t have needed to fear that they could accost me or – horror of horrors – even touch me.
Now as they came closer, I saw that the father of the family wasn’t intact either. He had no arms from the elbows down. He also lacked ears and a nose, which was only fair in a way, because what would he do without hands if he wanted to pick his nose or dig in his ear with a little finger? And was that a limp he had? His legs looked as if they’d been beaten into the shape of an X. Again, two diagonals, I noted. The children, as so often happens, combined the features of their father and mothers. They all looked the same: dark-skinned and dirty, with pale, gummed-up eyes. It would have been impossible to distinguish them if it had not been for their bodily imperfections.
Should I Stay or Should I Go, I thought, as this family of invalids shuffled towards me, accompanied by whooping and the rhythmical clacking of crutches. But I didn’t take to my heels because just at that moment the writer in me awoke, after having lain dormant for years. Literature thrives on human misfortune, and the beggars in front of me were a prime example of the agony of existence. It occurred to me that if I couldn’t squeeze a good story out of them, I’d never be able to write. Having now found a way to exploit them, I decided to spend a little longer in their company. Yet at the same time, I realised that they also had an idea or two about how to exploit me. Perhaps they’d decided to club me to death with their crutches and then eat me. A fatso like me would be food for them for a whole month, I worried. My body would never be found, if I was searched for at all. No-one saw me enter the car park, and no-one would ever think of looking for me here; my mind played over a paranoid scenario.
Fortunately, I found a way of giving them the slip. I scaled the fire-escape stairs up to the ventilation duct of the nuclear shelter. It was clear to me that those invalids would never be able to make it up here, and sure enough, the head of the family scrutinised the stairs, almost to the point of sniffing them like a dog. As I’d assumed, he concluded I was beyond their reach. He turned to the family and spread his arms – or what he had left of them – in a gesture of helplessness.
They all gathered beneath me and called out in one voice for alms, obviously without thinking for a second how pointless their demand was. I watched them from my vantage point like populist leaders behold the crowd from the balconies where they hold their speeches. The small children reached out their trembling little hands towards me. Only then did I notice that every hand had only three fingers. The Serbian three-finger salute, I thought to myself!
So I yelled down to them like Slobodan Milošević at one of his rallies in the nineties, ‘I love you too!’
‘We’re hungry, give us alms!’ called one of the one-armed women. ‘Please…May God grant you health,’ said the other.
That cheered me up no end; a person afflicted by leprosy had just wished me good health!
‘See, you’re laughing,’ said the head of the household, determined to seize on my good mood. ‘Give us food and we’ll make you laugh all night long.’
Ha, these weren’t beggars but entertainers! The five grubby children had perhaps taken The Jackson 5 as models. Since that was a respectable way of providing for oneself, I promised to throw them a few crumbs. I took a good swig from my bottle.
‘If you want to eat, tell me about yourselves,’ I proposed. And that they did.
They were originally from Kosovo. They’d had a hard time all their lives, the father emphasised, as if that didn’t go without saying for every human being. ‘Me and my two ladies went from town to town,’ he explained. ‘Then the children came along, three little angels,’ he sighed wistfully.
‘With swarthy faces,’ I added with compassion.
He claimed that they’d worked hard but never earned enough for a house of their own. Therefore, they slept in caves. In a cavern near Prizren they came across a colony of lepers. They tried to flee, but the lepers blocked the exit with their bodies, a barrier more effective than electrified barbed wire. They let him go, but his wives and children were held hostage. Every day he had to bring the lepers food, he said. That went on for months. Then they were liberated by NATO, which was bombing Serbia at the time; it seems a pilot missed his target and his rocket hit the cave. They fled through the flames as the cave collapsed behind them.
A period of prosperity followed for the polygamous family. Infected with leprosy but as yet unaware of it, they roamed from village to village after the residents had fled to Albania to escape the Serbian army.
‘The soldiers left us alone,’ the paterfamilias said. ‘We told them we’re Balkan Egyptians,1 and they had nothing against us. Nor we against them. And when they came in trucks and took away everything of value in the villages, there was still enough for us.’
But when the Serbian army withdrew and the Kosovar villagers returned to their ransacked homes, difficult times were in store for the family. Everyone beat them up and they were blamed for all ills, the head of the household complained. When irate villagers raped his wives and broke his legs with a pickaxe, they realised they’d better run for it. They ended up here in Ulcinj, and regretted it a hundred times. No-one gave them a lousy dinar here, he bellyached. It’s as if the people here had no feelings. But the worst was yet to come…
‘We have no education,’ they told me. ‘So how were we to know that we’d come down with leprosy too? We caught if from those miserable lepers in the cave.’
‘When my missus came up with a lump on her back, I got worried and took her to see a doctor. And he called the police,’ the head of the family said. ‘Men with gas masks came, armed with hoses, and evacuated the dispensary. We and the doctor were quarantined. He was let out the next day when they established he wasn’t infected, but we were held there for a few days more. And then one evening we were brought here to the abandoned car park. If we ever came out or so much as poked our noses out of the car park, we’d be killed, the police warned us. But I no longer had a nose then – it had fallen off all by itself.’ He laughed heartily at the police’s stupidity.
From then on, the years were filled with misery. Two more children were born, and they lost the odd arm and leg. But all in all they led a peaceful life, he said. The police’s threat had been quite unnecessary; ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ he emphasised.
‘If anyone tries to drive us out of the car park, we’ll fight for our right to stay,’ the whole family chipped in.
The car park had become the home they’d been searching for all their lives. They claimed to have everything down there: food, a roof over their heads, and peace and quiet.
‘In the world outside we get beaten up and abused, and we’d be strangers wherever we went. But down here we’re masters of our own home,’ the head of the family explained. ‘Outside my children would be despised, but here they grow up surrounded by love. Outside they’d grow up seeing others beat and humiliate me, while here in the car park I can gain their respect. That’s important because I’m their father. We stay because we’re happy here,’ he said, unaware that he’d just convincingly refuted Tolstoy, who claimed that all happy families are happy in the same way.
I have a vision, I wanted to tell them. I am a piper with a funny Tyrolean cap, which Thomas Bernhard would find laughable, and am dressed in green knickerbockers with suspenders like Heidegger used to wear. I march along blowing my pipe. And just as the rats faithfully followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whom German towns hired to rid them of the bright-eyed rodents, so the abandoned, homeless and sick shall follow me. I play my pipe, and the leprous beggars totter after me up the stairs, and we leave the car park into the summer night full of neon and lust. The music from my magic pipe needles its way through the blaring bands on the café terraces and makes it through to every old lady about to be poisoned by her relatives so they can share out the inheritance; to every child who will be suffocated by its mother in a shanty on the outskirts and thrown into a stream clogged with plastic bags and old umbrellas; to every AIDS-infected young woman who trembles in her room, dreading the moment when people will find out; to every raped boy; to every alcoholic dying of liver cirrhosis down in the cellar, banished and abandoned by his ex-wife and children upstairs; to everyone on the verge of suicide, standing on a rickety chair with a noose around their neck – my music is like a waking hand which reaches out to all the tuberculosed, the blind and deaf, the paraplegics and lepers. They are my army! Arrayed in a column behind me, they limp, lurch, stagger, crawl, drag their withered legs, and roll along in their wheelchairs. They follow my footsteps, just like the rats followed the Pied Piper. This is my grisly army beneath banners of blood-drenched bandages. Like avengers, we enter city after city and leave our mark in parliaments, malls, schools and hospitals. With every step we take we spread disease and disaster. We sneeze, pee, bleed, and leave bacilli on everything we touch. Wherever we go, we remake everything in our likeness, and all that is living falls before the contagion. Now they are all my soldiers. Faithfully they form a mighty column, and I think: O children of the dark generations, silvery do shine the evil flowers of blood on our brows, and the cold moon in our broken eyes, o my blighted brethren!
This is my grisly army, and there are ever more and more of us: all the beggars of Delhi, all the homeless of Brooklyn, all those who have grown up beneath Cairo and all the hungry of Kinshasa. Longer and ever longer is the column behind me, and the choir of a billion diseased voices, in unison, roars the cheerful refrain played by the pipe: Death to Everyone is Gonna Come. Here we are now on the sea shore, and here I am walking on water. Death to Everyone… I play and mark time as I watch the cliffs over which my army, my grisly army, plunges into the sea and vanishes in the blue depths. I play faster and faster, now it is already tempo furioso: without a tear, without a scream, without regret and remorse, all that is mine falls to its death.
_______________
1 Albanian-speaking Romanies (Gypsies) who believe that their ancestors migrated from the Indian Subcontinent to Europe via Egypt.