“THE KID DID A THOROUGH JOB. He wanted to be sure he wouldn’t survive,” the inspector had commented.
They found Daniel’s body immediately, some twenty meters from the viaduct, in a vineyard, and his left arm only two days later, in a stream under a spruce bush.
“You’re lucky, the part that was in the water wasn’t got by vermin,” said the coroner when we had made our way down the long staircase into the hospital’s basement mortuary. They had somehow attached the arm for the identification.
Blood had spurted all over the place, over the trees and the frozen vine leaves, said people who had made a pilgrimage to the place of the mishap for the first few weeks, leaving plastic roses and lamps that lasted as long as their batteries did behind the St. Andrew’s cross.
“A performance,” my sister had said as we approached the railway line.
On the day of the funeral some relations whom I barely knew drove me from Zagreb.
They crammed six adults into the car. It was drizzling and we were all given a salami sandwich for the journey. The air was sour as were the salami and the drizzle.
Later, in the evening, as my sister and I drew near to the railway, I was still feeling sick from that air in my nostrils. My sister wanted to get it over with quickly and dragged me by my moist, limp hand, as though we were children; she held it for a while in her own cold, dry one, digging her little sharp nails into my palm.
In the mortuary, I looked at my brother’s right hand, on which the nails he’d always bitten down to the quick had grown in the meantime. Because of those nails that had grown I would’ve known he was dead, even in my sleep.
“It’s Daniel,” I said, although the puppet with the small head lying on the metal table no longer had anything to do with him.
He didn’t leave any kind of letter.
“They don’t usually leave any, actually,” people told me.
“Get over it, doesn’t everyone leave without a message, what’s so strange?” said my sister.
What do I know about everyone, I thought. It wasn’t like Daniel, I thought, to go without a word.
Some people I half knew wept without ceasing and that drove me out of the house. I remember that one lady in black, who used to frequent funerals, sat in the hall, in the corner under Mother’s old hair dryer, sobbing and blowing her nose noisily, so that she looked like a desperately grieving woman at a hairdresser’s.
“Masochists,” said my sister. “They didn’t even know him. Perverse.”
Once, as children, we’d been at a funeral in the hills, where a professional mourner had been brought in, paid to wail and so inspire other people to cry. I think she was exceptionally successful as I too began to cry, from pure horror. Then my sister said: “They’ve terrified the kid, masochists.”
That was the first time I heard that word.
The years—from the day when the police rang the bell and Ma opened the door—passed in a flash, but I remember that unknown lady in black under the hair dryer better than any of the three of us.
Between my brother’s death and my sister’s almost incidental phone call that brought me back home, nothing worthy of mention happened, at least not to me.
I returned to the Old Settlement, for the answer to my question, for the words that my brother had sent to some fourth person, not to my mother, nor my sister, nor me. That’s what drives me to keep walking, turning over every stone. And, if truth be told, all I’ve discovered in my roaming and turning over is that the world contains more stones than snakes and bugs under them.
“Yawn and stretch as much as you can,” ginger Jill told me in an ancient dream. And I obey her, because every cat that speaks, even in a dream, deserves attention. I am waiting on a bench in the deep shade of a carob tree for my host to appear, I yawn and stretch in the scorching, endless, hypnotic Settlement afternoon. Lethargy, they call it, when a place hypnotizes you.
In the silence, from the other side of the garden, over the wall, purple figs can be heard thudding onto the ground, their tree, abandoned to itself, having gone wild like the beanstalk up which that idiot wanted to climb to the sky.
Through the brightly colored strips of plastic of the curtain in the doorway, Herr Professor appears and places a tray of cold tea and cakes on the garden table.
“Petits-fours,” he says.
He stretches out his fleshy legs with their strong white calves and from time to time rubs one pink heel against the other. On the other side of the courtyard, beside the broken greenhouse, with two stunted lemon trees, their branches pruned, a pair of tortoises are mating. “They’re a bit late this year,” says the Professor. The female doesn’t stir, while the male has opened his little mouth wide. There are a few stiff, dirty rags on the washing line, with flies and flying ants landing on them, and from the garden, tap water drips persistently into the yellowing stone basin.
I bend toward the iced cakes, but the Professor stops me with a movement of his hand. Something is noiselessly rolling toward us.
“Listen!”
Cymbals clang and stop the air.
“It’s St. Fjoko’s Day,” Ma had concluded this morning at breakfast.
“St Fjoko,” I say out loud, reaching for a cake.
“Aha, the town saint’s day!” The Professor slaps his thighs.
“Vrdovđek just bought it. The brass band.”
“Vrdovđek, oh yes. The one with all the shops?”
“Shops, and everything in the Settlement. He’s the big shot now,” I say.
I watch the Professor: his face, his blinking eyes, large hands, so white they’re almost blue. Over the years, his physical resemblance to a drowned man has become more obvious. And with those whiskers and that mustache—like a catfish, really. Whales and dolphins returned to the sea, disappointed with life on land, but the Professor’s type of sea creature had remained forever in between, wedged. He had once kept salamanders in formalin in glass jars in his living room, the way people in the Old Settlement keep pictures of their closest relatives. He also had two salamanders (“two fiery dragons,” he said), but I think all those jars were shattered in the incident.
With a rolled newspaper, he attempts to drive away the flies attracted by the cakes. As he swats them, scampering round the table, he is no less formal and pompous than he was a little earlier with the tray, I observe.
“He’s got manners, that man,” Ma once said. She always overrated politeness.
“His whole family, especially his late mother, was very refined. Crème de la crème,” said Mother’s relative Mariana Mateljan. And added: “God knows who this waster takes after.”
He kills several horseflies and smaller flies and sits down right beside me. He smiles like a pile of gelatin, slightly triumphantly, and “in that name” opens a special cut-glass bottle. The liquid in the bottom of the glass looks like the fluid in which the amphibians on the vet’s sideboard had once swum. I can’t avoid that image, although I recognize the smell of rose liqueur, honey-sweet and sharp.
“Rose liqueur,” the insatiable one used to say. “Oops-a-daisy! That’ll warm those fine ladies up. Give ’em a couple of glasses, they all start cooling themselves with their skirts. They haul their dresses up over their knees and air themselves. The whole street’ll stink of cunt…”
“The larger the cymbal, the deeper the sound and the longer it lasts, it behaves like spilled mercury,” says Herr Professor, handing me a silver teaspoon.
The light here is very soft and perhaps that, combined with the brass band and the liqueur, is why I am feeling lethargic.
Now that I was finally within reach of him, I had kept putting off the meeting like an exam or a visit to the doctor, but in the neglected garden belonging to that gelatin gentleman whom I do not wish to touch with even a millimeter of skin or clothing and of whose breathing beside me I am all too conscious, I feel that, after so many years of dragging my heels, I have sat down beside water, to rest. I have arrived somewhere. If nothing else, I am no longer being tormented by the need to get up and walk.
The timpani announce summer; the brass band declares the beginning of a cheerful holiday, even if it lasts only a few moments.
“Even a bear can play the cymbals,” my sister said on one occasion.
But I like cymbals. Without them a marching band would be less exciting.
“Cymbals and trumpet, that is, dear Dada, true theater! In the street! In our Long Street!” Herr Professor beams, like a returned exile.
He had polished the brass plate on his flaking front door, I observed: SMALL ANIMAL VETERINARY CLINIC. K. ŠAIN.
“Karlo Šain, good name for an opera conductor or someone’s uncle,” said my sister, long ago.
“Your buddy’s a faggot, you clown,” she said, slapping Daniel’s bum when he began visiting the vet frequently, as though he had bird flu.
“Fag, fag,” she taunted, making that shameful gesture with her hand and fist. Daniel would respond with another gesture, careless, twisting his finger against his temple, I recall.
Although she was never what you might call a beauty, my sister could, even then, have had a lot of men—for her sake one had already dived off the Big Pier onto the rocks, but he didn’t make it to the sea, or her attention. Tenderness in her had solidified like sugar on which you break your teeth. My sister always expresses caution as far as love is concerned, I observed. That stiffness doesn’t fit with her lips, like a wound, or her smooth dark skin. “Camouflaged,” Daniel called her if she wasn’t in the room with us.
Whoever met my brother wanted to take him home, to have him nearby laughing or speaking, to be Daniel, to touch him on the shoulder, to pinch his cheek (which he hated). He had the gentleness and ferocity of a serious little man. Well, tenderness attracts people in different ways, it tempts some to crush it, I recall, people often wanted to thrash him; it gets on some people’s nerves. Being just a little bit different was always an excellent reason for something to be destroyed.
I see them: my older sister and my younger brother sitting arguing, their heads close together so that Ma wouldn’t hear them: side by side like that, they looked like a cactus and its flower.
Keeping company with the vet developed into friendship the autumn my brother started secondary school. That year Daniel made a terrarium in the Prof’s garden: over dry sand that he had carried from the Little Lagoon glided lizards, transparent little tarantulas, and a blasé gecko, a big greenhorn, a real dandy; he had fireflies and scarab beetles and two tortoises, you could tell the female by her cracked shell, I recall. They survived and are still here in the garden, beside the clouded glass of the greenhouse, which “bore witness to the fact that this house had seen better days,” said my sister once. The Professor’s yard, enclosed by a stone wall with little sparkling pieces of mother-of-pearl in it, the bodies of shellfish, and its crawling, rattling, grunting animal kingdom, attracted us, all of us children, I recall. We used to go there almost stealthily, because of those stories. Apart from Daniel, who, by all accounts, had no problems of that kind.
Later I observed behavior similar to ours in people who privately, to themselves, admire things that they will gladly vilify in public, equally sincerely and fervently. That must be painful, I thought. Depends on the person, I think now.
It seemed that everything was simpler for Daniel. He came here every day for as long as he felt like coming. Perhaps that’s why my younger brother is more present in this yard than in our house.
It’s still strange, I find myself thinking, that Daniel won’t now appear through the colorful plastic strips in the Prof’s doorway. This is all that remains of his games, those two debauched tortoises, the already brittle posters for cowboy films that I had moved to my own room, and this Herr Professor here.
The only other possession of my brother’s that I regretted was the Colt our father had given him, which we never found, along with his school case.
In my pocket I have a letter that has been folded and unfolded countless times. On a dirty piece of paper, typed on an old typewriter, it says:
Dear Daniel,
I’m sorry I haven’t written before now. The circumstances are such that I rarely open my electronic post, and I don’t have access to a computer here. In fact, it’s a lucky chance that I did read your messages at all. As you see (postmark), my work has taken me to the other side of the world. You’re clever and you probably know that I’ll need more time than has now passed to accept some of the things that happened, but I blame myself for this more than I do you. This stamp, of course, is not random, it’s for you, as is the picture of the spotted salamander I’m sending you. I hope you’ll like it. These are things I can’t send by email, so I’m sending them by good old postal coach! There, let them be signs of reconciliation and good will. You write about the difficulties that have befallen you—I hope that you’ll be able to solve those problems and that they aren’t a consequence of that unpleasant event. I’d like to be able to help you. However, at present I can barely help myself, I sleep in some rather strange and miserable places, I eat when I manage it, that’s how things are. It seems as though I’ve acquired pneumonia as well. For the moment I’m still not in a position to send you an address where you could write to me, or to promise that I’ll be able to read your emails for the foreseeable future, but I hope it won’t be long before I can. I’ll let you know. Keep well.
Greetings,
Your Friend
In the upper right corner there is a date, several days after Daniel’s death.
I wasn’t impatient, and I wasn’t rushing anywhere.
I had left several messages on his answering machine—I knew he was just a few meters away, the man who had the answer, behind the walls that divided his garden from the rest of the Settlement; and I believed that he would look for me. I turned several times into the short side street where his house was, but at the last minute my will failed me or I would be overcome by a comical and terrible shame or unease.
Today the telephone rang as Ma was making coffee for herself and her relative Mariana Mateljan. Cigarette smoke swirled down the corridor from the kitchen, water gurgled in the pot on the hot plate. They were both staring at a soap.
Šain Karlo here, please, I would like… to speak to Dada… So, at last, dear Dada!
“Mariana’s my oldest friend,” Ma would mention from time to time. “And my close relative,” she’d add.
Mariana had been coming from the city center in an orange Lada for decades—on Sundays, sometimes also on Wednesdays. Then one of the two of them would say something they shouldn’t have and Mariana Mateljan would vanish without trace for a week, a month, and once even for two years. A black fart of smoke would puff out of the Lada’s exhaust and she would drive off furiously like an orange out of hell. The last time that happened, we wrote her off forever, but then she did appear again just after Daniel’s death.
I did not wish to disturb your dear mother… Otherwise, I would have got in touch myself, had I known that you… Had I known that you had come. Yes, yes, I did, I got your messages, but—I was away. Out of town on business. But, of course! It would be important for me, I would be glad if you came. Of cooourse… To remember the old days. Besides, besides…
“Hell, I thought we’d got rid of her, like the others,” said my sister when Mariana appeared among us again, with swollen eyes.
My sister polished her hatred of her to a high shine, I recall.
But still, Mariana finally found an appropriate role in our house and played it briskly and steadfastly. She was devoted to our ebbing Ma; Ma’s misfortune brought Mariana freedom in their relationship. We knew—had it not been for Daniel’s death, our relative would never have crossed the threshold of this house again.
Pride is such a bizarre attribute, and self-destructive; I’m not really clear why we count it a virtue.
For the first two weeks after Daniel’s funeral, there would be up to thirty people in our house every day, they drank brandy, smoked and talked, and then suddenly, no one remembers the transition, they disappeared. Bit by bit, after some time, they stopped phoning as well. They probably didn’t know what to talk about, it “discom-mod-ed them all,” said my sister.
Mother sat and nodded the wax mask on her face up and down, like people on antipsychotic drugs when they come out of the madhouse, looking like robots or disinterred totems. My sister washed glasses ceaselessly, emptied ashtrays, and sent piercing glances toward her soft, now former, husband. Tragedy swayed in the room, hanging from the ceiling light between the visitors and us.
“Someone else’s tragedy, that requires commitment,” said my sister.
Come as soon as you can, come whenever you like. We’re not far, we’re neighbors, after all! Yes, yes, of course. Knock hard… my bell still doesn’t work… on the door… Bye. Bye, my dear.
I put the receiver down.
Mariana was sitting in a preparing-to-concentrate attitude in front of the television, cracking walnuts.
“It’s our St. Fjoko’s Day today,” she said.
“He saved us from the plague,” she added, scratching her belly.
“And died of syphilis,” she said emphatically.
I guessed that this was the beginning of one of Mariana’s bravura tirades, and they shouldn’t be missed. I’ll go this afternoon, besides, besides.
I’ve no clue what our Fjoko died of or why. His holy bone was carried up and down in a silver box behind the high cross along the one decent road in the Settlement. The Long Road leading from the port to the way out onto the highway.
On St. Fjoko’s Day, a band of male and female blowers, sweaty in their blue uniforms, blares away all day, morning and afternoon. Toward evening the men from the brotherhood squeeze into cowls and set off in a procession with flaming torches, while behind them the nuns and women from the church choir of St. Lisa sing monotonously.
Around the tail of the centipede that is twice as long as Long Road, the emotional populace mills with dignity. They mill, because Long Road is not particularly long and sometimes the procession’s head catches up with its own tail.
“Dunque,” continues Mariana, licking honey from the piece of bread on which she has laid the walnuts, “the future saint’s embarrassing illness never stops him carrying on with his lovers. In fact, his body’s falling apart, his bones is decaying, but his spirit’s still lively. That’s why merciful and almighty God left our martyr, for all he was syphilitic, untouched in the part that was for his devotees, as indeed for the whole town today, a holy relic—here, like this!”
She stretched out her fat middle finger with two gold rings and a long, polished nail.
“He never did!” I bleated. She sometimes imagined things, like every born storyteller who sacrifices truth on the altar of the story.
Everyone knows that Fjoko had a blessed finger whose touch cured lepers. So what was so fantastic about this, I asked her.
Mariana’s body, covered in tinkling jewellery, in its wide tunic of dazzling brightness, had settled into the couch, but only in order to spread its crest.
“All depends,” she answered. “You can lie to tell the truth. When all’s said and done, in all the hullabaloo over St. Fjoko there’s a little bone from his middle finger, so you just have a think.”
She smacked her lips and lightly stroked her gold and silver rings over sleepy Jill, who had snuggled in between the cushions.
Mariana has a long head, good-looking in a horsey way, and you can’t say that horses aren’t beautiful, but her body is enormous, it seethes even when it’s still, creating ebbing and flowing tides around it as it moves.
Ma was smiling absently as she put out her cigarette. The ashtray was brimming with flat cigarette butts and walnut shells. Then she immediately rolled and lit a new one and turned up the volume.
Aaron clasped Minerva in a passionate embrace.
Mariana wiped away an invisible tear with her thumb.
Beside her, Ma looked like a wax candle beside a lighted Chinese lantern, I observed.
Our relative waved her hands, pressing the heat and stench out of the room. She sank still more deeply into the couch, occupying all the comfort available. I thought about the way Mariana sucked in through her pores the comfort of whatever room she found herself in. Along with the comfort, all the kitchen smells and household dust and odor of Tiger Balm from Mother’s skin entered into her as well. Created from all those particles, which she absorbed like a brightly colored hole in space, her laughter swelled and bubbled out of the windows, while her imperial flesh gushed under her wide clothes.
“Someday she’ll go into our kitchen,” my sister said once, and our kitchen is small, “and she’ll never be able to get out again.”
After the soap, we drank up our bitter Turkish coffee, listening to the clock ticking in the hall as in some distant-period pantry, muffled by many years of accumulated preserves that time had forgotten to abandon and move on.
Perhaps they were thinking about poor Aaron, a mulatto who dies of jealousy on a daily basis. The people, who occasionally pass under our windows, carrying benches and large pots for fish stew into Long Road, are surely thinking about the celebration, the feast day. I was thinking about the afternoon and about Herr Professor Karlo Šain, who still had to answer my question and whose neighboring house suddenly seemed to me as though it were at the end of a forest.
That evening, beneath the window stood a young man with a mouth organ, only without the mouth organ—the good-looker I saw the night I arrived in town, at the Last Chance. I had already recognized him through the thin curtains by his silhouette. He was, evidently, waiting for someone on the corner behind the former Co-operative Building, directly opposite the baker’s house. Like this, without his blue tuxedo, he looked like an ordinary lad, killing time.
Nevertheless, the boy is really nice-looking, I thought to myself. Handsome, they would say in books. One of those whom you could just look at for hours and it would be interesting. Dark legs in white socks and grimy white trainers. Shoulders, bearing—is that indifference—eyes narrow between his lashes. He was kicking a squashed plastic bottle over the gravel, unaware of how striking he was.
“Angelo,” a tall passerby in a hurry addressed him, that’s how he had been greeted by someone in a Municipal Cleaning Department uniform who had passed by a little while ago, pushing a cart with brushes and a black plastic bucket, that was the name that a thin little girl whispered to another, long-legged, laughing, as they glided past him on Rollerblades.
After a while a woman came for him in a convertible, around thirty, dressed formally and elegantly: cream skirt, lilac blouse, fine and bright, and cream sandals with low heels. She was carrying a summer coat over her arm, under her armpits she had visible damp patches, her limbs were slender and firm, the tanned skin on them polished, shiny, her long hair gathered up into a bun.
“Like an advert,” Ma would say.
As he walked toward her little sports car, the young man looked up, toward the place where I was standing, leaning out. But I don’t believe he saw me. The western sun was gleaming from the direction of the house.
Beside Angelo, on the sunny side, his short shadow glided, suddenly lengthening as he walked, reaching right up to the woman’s feet, then touching them, covering them, stroking them.
Outside our building, the tepid salt air was filled with motionless images without perspective. It was a world of theater flats and vertical planes, which a cat can scuttle over or a child with a bloody knee pushing a scooter crosses in a few steps. This is the part of the day when birds go crazy above the factory chimneys, a ripe August afternoon in which the bare Settlement bakes under a heavy lid and the sea evaporates.
“Sultry, heavy, and desolate,” the insatiable one would say.
I had never considered burned-up landscapes ugly, only tedious; or desperate, if I was myself in despair. Not in a hundred years will this ever bloom into a paradise garden. No way, I thought.
The whole day the sky looked like an apocalyptic postcard.
“Divine Providence!” the insatiable one would observe of such dramatic stage designs. Because cumulus clouds had begun to gather in the west and the oppressive heat would be so intense that, although it was nearly evening, the wallpaper in the rooms would start to sweat, and the branches of the poisonous oleanders in the yard, scalded with damp, would droop to the ground.
People would walk with greasy, wet faces and tap their barometers in disbelief when they predicted stormy weather and low blood pressure, sometimes unconsciousness. Inertia, in any case, and “that’s not laziness, but an acute sickness of the will,” my sister correctly observed.
The boy with the mouth organ and his escort (or, in fact, he’s most probably the escort) had left the stage, so for a moment the street was empty and abandoned.
“Rusty’s back!” shouted the little girl on the Rollerblades to her friend, sailing into the frame. I waved to them. I picked up a hat and waved harder.
“Hey-ey, Rusty!” the little girls waved back.
On my way out I jumped over the shoes that Ma had forgotten and that were still baking on the steps; there was fresh seagull shit on some of them.
In Long Road, the suburb smelled of impending rain and incense from the impending procession, and some people were taking tables out for this evening’s festivities. Like an apparition, down the street rode that old blacksmith on his horse, talking to someone on his cell phone, hands free.
When the sun goes down I say: I’ll go and look for a job, and then I wander. In fact, I wander from morning to night. On Monday and Friday mornings Ma and I follow the standard route from the graveyard to the beach.
“When I’m up there, I’m with them,” says Ma solemnly, in a high register like an amen.
“Go with her, she’ll fall under a truck, she’s so woozy in this sun,” my sister phoned to say.
So I accompany her. We’re becoming like those mother-daughter pairs that don’t separate even when the little girl grows up. Only then it usually turns out that it’s the daughter, rather than the mother, who’s lost the plot.
Such pairs can often be seen in the more affluent districts, in better-educated and well-to-do families, also in families with no sons, I’ve observed. So we don’t satisfy a single one of the criteria.
The mothers and daughters I’m talking about are often very similar physically and they dress in a similar way, but sometimes the mother is pretty and young, while the daughter is ugly or fat. They sit in the morning at Clio or Twingo and go to shopping centers and cafés together.
“Your younger sister?” passing acquaintances will inquire courteously.
And the mother and daughter smile equally courteously or the mad daughter will just keep going, while the mother feels uncomfortable and breaks off the chat.
The news here is that last Monday Super Mario clones came to our settlement, with little red caps and red boiler suits, and in a matter of days demolished and then began to rebuild the Illyria.
We passed the Illyria almost every day, so that we were able to follow that amazing development as on a speeded-up film. It was as though the cement contained some luxury substance that made the building rise like dough and be rejuvenated.
This reminded me of a program about nature that Ma regularly watched—the credits would show a gaudy flower that germinated, swelled, and burst into flower from an ordinary seed in five seconds, and then, in the next five seconds, in a new frame we would see an embryo becoming, in an incomprehensible transformation, a burly fellow, with the face of an urban peasant, but no doubt of a romantic disposition, because he picks the flower.
That sequence left me with a certain skepticism about the natural sluggishness of the eye.
A gust of wind briefly cooled the air, but it also washed all kinds of rubbish into the Little Lagoon—the main attraction being the corpse of a young shark—so on the whole I lounged in the shade with a towel spread out between cigarette butts and peach stones, watching the boats moving around the little islands outside the bay, in the middle of the channel.
Mother would stretch out on the beach, picking from it a morning rosary of tiny shells and sea snails, smaller than a child’s nail and delicately formed. She was more likely to be intrigued by a snowflake, filigree, or a word on a grain of rice than the Eiffel Tower or the Sahara. She once bought special paints and drew miniature drawings on hollow eggshells. But that was before her narcotic phase, while she still had ambitions of a sort.
The sea in the bay is a dense color and as stable as primeval soup. Later, around midday, little boys come and gambol extravagantly in the shallows, but first thing in the morning it is tranquil, apart from the sounds of building works from the direction of the Illyria.
I like the Little Lagoon more than the other beaches in the Settlement because of the five old pines whose crowns are so high that I have to turn my head upside down and gaze straight into the sky to see them, which makes me dizzy; and it’s not exposed to the south wind, so that there has always been less tar than at the other bathing places, from which we returned with black marks on our pants, I recalled. The beach was edged with laurel and pittosporum, planted by a Czech doctor who had once lived above the Little Lagoon. Even today his house is still the nicest in the Old Settlement, “far nicer than Karlo Šain’s house,” said Ma. The pittosporum bushes were decorated with ice cream wrappings and condoms; “at least the Little Lagoon hasn’t yet been totally shit to pieces,” said my sister.
On this little piece of the coast everything is in any case crumbling from disease, with the dignity of an aging alcoholic who remembers more glorious summers, just as Mother remembers Split festivals with Vice Vukov and Claudia Villa.
Some ruins can definitely be beautiful even when they stink, but as far as the Illyria is concerned, it was always ugly, like all buildings built in the fifties.
“It was a lot uglier when it was new,” said Ma.
It didn’t help that it was a hotel. I’d been inside it more than once and I’d not found anything that would justify the idea of a hotel: a pool with turquoise tiles or afternoon silence at Reception, even the towels weren’t white and rough with a logo and the inscription HOTEL, but brightly colored, ordinary, thin with washing. But still, the most important element was there: the smell of chlorine on the starched sheets, the smell of Indian tea and pâté, the stench of other people’s summer holidays.
People from the Settlement and tourists gathered outside the Illyria every day, looking at the Super Mario clones and commenting.
“What’s this?”
“What’s this?”
“What the hell is this?”
“Vrdovđek has bought the Illyria.”
“Quesque c’est?”
“Che cosa è questo?”
“Das ist eine Baustelle.”
“Nein, das ist ein Freudenhaus!”
“C’est un hôtel.”
“Wrdovjack?! Was ist Wrdovjack?”
“Vítejte v mé zahrade!”
“Shtooo?”
“Üdvözlöm! Üdvözlöm!”
“Delighted to meet you!”
Harum-farum-larum—hedervarum.
The very next day, someone had written, behind the Table of Lies, on the wall beside the former Illyria:
WOTS DIS DOIN ON OUR PATCH?
* * *
In our kitchen, Mariana Mateljan tells us that Ned Montgomery is coming to Croatia: it’s in all the newspapers, and all the portals are also screaming. This is the second time, they report. The first time Ned was young and unknown in Yugoslavia and he died in one of the opening scenes of the film Winnetou, they report. Newer generations know him better as one of the first 3-D heroes of computer games, they report.
That’s a game with a lot of dead cyber cowboys in which the good guys, the player and Ned, if they’re quick on the draw and have a bit of luck, win shiny sheriff’s stars. The aim is always the same: not to allow the sons of bitches to defeat you.
“Ned Montgomery isn’t the kind of guy who bakes himself on a yacht on the Hvar waterfront, he doesn’t sip cappuccinos on the Dubrovnik Stradun with bodyguards at his backside, and he doesn’t wave from a transparent capsule at us ordinary mortals, Balkanjeros, like other so-called stars,” said my sister, blessing the famous actor. Ned Montgomery is not overly talkative; in interviews he replies to questions: Yes. No. Naturally. Thanks.
He doesn’t put on airs, they’d say in the Old Settlement.
Once a TV journalist said: “Okay, Ned, I thought you were a bit of a lad.”
“Hmm?”
“But how can you be a bit of a lad, if you’ve been with one and the same woman for twenty years now?”
“Well, I’m a cowboy,” explained Montgomery, lighting a cigarette in the studio as though it was nothing to do with him.
“Somehow everyone realized that being a lad is bad news for a cowboy,” said Daniel.
That one and the same woman was the fabulous Chiara Buffa, an announcer and singer on Radio Italia who later died tragically and to whom he had been introduced on a set by Sergio Leone, the newspapers wrote. There was once a whole supplement about them.
And Daniel said it didn’t seem at all impossible that someone would be able to get it up for twenty years for Chiara Buffa.
Mariana Mateljan brought me the paper and showed me the article.
“Why look, dear God in ’eaven, that cowboy from your room ’as come!” she said, shoving the paper under my nose.
The producer was the famous Ned Montgomery—it said in the Spectacle column. The popular actor and director of spaghetti westerns, who embodied many of the legends of the Wild West—it said. Some scenes in the new film, which we discover is also some sort of western, will be shot on location in our neighborhood.
Ned Montgomery, otherwise from these parts through his grandfather on his mother’s side, had been a star as early as the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and his best-known creations were in the films Gold Dust, More Gold Dust in the Eyes, The Return of Virgil C. and Virgil C’s Last Bullet, blah, blah—wrote the journalist.
Daniel would’ve been delighted, I thought delightedly. This would’ve been news for him, even though years had passed.
“Good morning, cowboy!” my brother used to greet himself when he was in a particularly good mood.
“Good night, cowboys and Indians! Make it snappy,” our father would say, chivying us to bed.
“I’m not a cowboy,” my sister would say.
“Nor an Indian.”
I moved the poster of Ned Montgomery into my room the day my sister and mother decided to rent out Daniel’s room, with its own entrance, to workers and tourists. “You can’t just crumple up that cowboy with his six gold Colts and chuck him in the trash,” said my sister.
What had that legendary Ned from the poster been? Marksman, poker player, lonely rider, sheriff of Yumo district, protector of women, keen on kerchiefs and hats, a devoted and sincere friend of men and dogs, quick on the draw and dropping his drawers. He was kept company on one part of the wall by the true champions Eastwood, Wayne, and Django.
I knew that Daniel would be okay with that.
The only role of Montgomery’s that I remember well, really very well, is in Virgil C’s Last Bullet when he’s killed by Lee Van Cleef in the final showdown. It’s unusual for the hero in a western to die. That film was rescreened numerous times on Sundays at 5 p.m. and we must have seen it every time. Virgil, the character played by Montgomery, had returned to his native Quentin, a small town he had abandoned in his eighteenth year, as I had mine, but on his return “he had not found a single one of his tears,” whereas that was all I’d found in the Old Settlement.
* * *
One of the things I enjoy most as I roam through the streets is finding old graffiti on top of and underneath the peeling rind of facades.
On the south-facing wall of the post office, where the half-blind tails of the alleys divide because our streets don’t start or finish, someone had written: CANTON OF CAPITULATION.
That wall is warm in winter and pleasant in summer, so widows lean their lower backs and narrow hunched shoulders and, under their dark clothes, their still-firm little bums against the graffiti.
In my early childhood our old great-grandmother protected that canton. The insatiable one, the oldest woman in the world. She was antique all our lives and old for almost half of hers. That day, when she capitulated, the old lady ate a whole plateful of little bitter fish and sweet white cabbage, I recall; the fish were bitter because of their innards, the cabbage was sweet because of the salt in the soil or because of the sun. Then—trying to control the trembling of her chin—out of which coiled several white hairs—she dragged a stool to the end of the road where the widows with dry mouths sat under the yellow neon sign of the new post office, chewing the cud. Some of them spent their last forty years at that corner, some spent forty days, but in the end, sooner or later, they all came, those with black headscarves and those with red pearls. They sat on little benches and spent the whole afternoon saying nothing in their brilliant dialect.
“Cul-de-sac,” Herr Professor would say. Blind alley.
The old men didn’t dally in that district—they just waved briefly and moved on—they occupied themselves at the other end of the Settlement, behind the Illyria and the slipway. The public social life of pensioners was strictly divided into female and male, as in a boarding school. The men played chess or cards at a long pine table or just sat, talking loudly. On the table’s concrete supports, someone had long ago written TABLE OF LIES.
Spat at, laughed at, then the next day patted on the back and celebrated, the knights of the Table of Lies, senile amateur politicians with a heart attack in their chests, moved figures of horses and huntsmen with their arthritic fingers, lost castles and pawns and exchanged an oral history of wars, fishing, and tourist sex. Demonstrating, proving that the past endures, that everything that once happened goes on simultaneously, and that in fact only the imperfect tense exists—that perfect verbal era and that thin, little borderline of shining conditionals: what would have happened if, a border stretched to infinity between the pluperfect and the future perfect, I reflected.
In former times, the lads from the Old Settlement who were going off to the Yugoslav National Army used to write their names on the walls of their houses, their date of birth and year they were called up. And they added some well-known lines of verse. At the bus station was written WAIT FOR ME SELENA from some song or other.
All these inscriptions became toponyms.
People say: “Let’s meet at Call-up ’65” or “Saw ’im this morning passing the Table of Lies,” or “Wait for me at Selena.” By now the words have been largely washed away by rain and sun—people are beginning to forget why the building with shutters the color of cornflowers, near the bus station, is called Selena.
The best-known of all the graffiti in the Old Settlement was written along the whole length of the parapet at the Main Jetty.
It was the spectacle of our childhood—greasy black letters on the white windbreak: STRANGER, THE LAW DOES NOT PROTECT YOU HERE. And high up on a mast, at the peak of the windbreak, on one leg stood not a vulture, a scavenger, but a seagull, a scrounger, Martin. All tame seagulls here are called Martin.
Legend has it that this graffito was the work of the Iroquois Brothers, which is impossible—I think that the inscription on the jetty was quite a lot older than the oldest of them.
In any case, when the waterfront was renovated a dozen years ago, they demolished the whole jetty, stone by stone. Afterward they put all those large stone blocks back, creating a new windbreak so that you could only make out here and there scattered parts of letters from which it was impossible to read STRANGER, THE LAW DOES NOT PROTECT YOU HERE. But then again, that graffito is forever inside, preserved in a sense.
An indelible mark was also left by the unknown hero who wrote, in bright blue paint all over the Settlement and down in the center: I LOVE YOU, NEDA. AND LOTS MORE BESIDES.
Just to be sure, he marked several of the more prominent places also with: HEY, NEDA, DO YOU READ BLUE GRAFITTI?
And there wasn’t a single Neda in the Settlement, just three Nadas. I wondered whether it was meant for one of them, and which.
Then, for a while, there was nothing new on the walls. If you don’t count the time when someone poured black paint over the plaque in the Community Hall listing the names of local Partisans and drew a swastika underneath it, and the following night the Partisan statues outside the primary schools and secondary school had their heads taken off. People all muttered about the Iroquois Brothers again, but I think that the business with the bronze heads was carried out by people from the new, not-yet-completed, three-story buildings on the other side of the railway. “Neo-outliers,” my sister called them. But maybe it wasn’t them; maybe I’m mistaken. Except in one thing: the Iroquois Brothers were vermin, even when they grew up, but they were too clever to destroy monuments.
In the Settlement there was no war in the sense of shooting; Yugoslav National Army ships fired at the western part of the town for two weeks, and then stopped. From time to time there’d be an air-raid siren as well. We were “cut off like on a lilo with sharks circling round it,” said Herr Professor.
My sister said “there was a stench.” Fear stinks, especially in shelters.
Some young guys from the Old Settlement, several years older than us, died in the war. We all cried.
Some other local men were taken away and disappeared without trace. We were all silent.
Some of our friends and their parents left the Settlement overnight and never came back.
We kids shouted “Serbian pervert!” to each other. Even the Serbs shouted that, those that hadn’t fled during the war or the hostile years that followed.
Everyone talked about snipers, and Mariana Mateljan, who had a personal demon in her head making her a target, arrived from the center in her orange Lada, drenched in sweat from holding her foot on the accelerator, and shouted from the doorway: “Give me sugar and water! What a dog’s life! Like I was driving soup in a shallow dish!” I recall. But I’ve forgotten quite a lot.
At that time, since we’re discussing graffiti, a big-eared U for the fascist Ustasha regime sprang up for the most part in the center as a popular design on street wallpaper. Some people did it for a joke, some out of conviction, some as an initiation ritual, and everyone out of boredom.
As far as the monuments went, the worthy citizens used to erect new totems and idols to replace the old ones, in a generational exchange of heroes.
For several days the papers chewed over the case of the name of the waterfront in the Old Settlement: should it be Jere Botušić (fighter in the National Liberation War, b. 1921—blown to bits by a hand grenade, 1943) Promenade or should the name be changed to Jere Botušić (Croatian defender, b. 1969—shot to pieces by a shell in 1993) Promenade. In the end a new inscription was placed on the waterfront with the name: Jere Botušić Promenade.
And the days passed peacefully, the walls were silent, the heads of the old statues sunk in the shifting bottom of the sea were silent, and indeed the new statues were silent too, guessing that it was just a matter of time before they too lost their heads.
Of the remaining graffiti of interest to me, there is one up by the railway track, in the little building that was once a waiting room and now serves as a shit house—an unofficial WC. It’s a drawing of a young, smiling, freckled cowboy, riding, instead of a bareback thoroughbred mare, an old bike, 50cc, toward the setting sun. Underneath, it says:
DANIEL R.I.P. THAT’S WHERE COWBOYS GO.
* * *
I’ve learned something about simultaneity: that memory is the present of all remembered events. The tape rolls forward and backwards. Fw-stop-rew-stop-rec-play-stop, it stops at important places, some images flicker dimly frozen in a permanent pause, unclear. But memory is also the saboteur editor in the back room, cutting and pasting, reframing to the very end, or at least until Alzheimer’s.
“The past is never completed, obviously,” Herr Professor announces, taking a VHS cassette out of an ancient video player. Only in the Old Settlement are there still people using video players.
“The past isn’t what it was,” I said.
That was all that was left of my brother, of his games, this pathetic Herr Karlo, I reflected. He placed his large misshapen mitts on the little garden table among the porcelain crockery. Like on my brother’s skinny shoulders.
“Gingernut,” that’s what he called him in the film.
We were there, at the waterfalls on the Krka River, on an excursion that I had entirely wiped from my memory. Here’s my gingernut, says the vet on the film we had just watched together.
Gingernut and a large hand on the back of his neck, the fingers wrapped in little rusty flames.
Shit, maybe he really did do that with Daniel, I reflected.
I imagined him falling prostrate in front of Daniel, on the cold floor with its mosaic of Chinese tiles, spattered with cat’s and dog’s blood, and taking out of his jeans fly with his fat fingers Daniel’s proud and indifferent penis.
In the terrarium the lizards fidget, in the formalin the salamanders float, and the crocodile slaps its tail against the cabbage tub.
Herr Karlo trembles like a bashed cymbal.
After the next cymbal blow (it’s a nice day and a holiday, but a filthy gray nimbus has sailed up from the west), together with the lame horns and shrill trumpet, other sounds begin to enter: a ring tone, the church, a muffled meowing from the street, the calling and shrieking of a grasshopper that Ma is beating with a twig of tamarisk while loudly cursing its mother. I always return to reality with some invested effort, as though from a distance. Even if they call me at eleven in the morning or six in the evening, people ask me: Did I wake you? Because that’s how I sound. I was awake, of course. I hadn’t even been asleep, I reflected.
In reality there exists that almost unreal letter chafing me in my pocket, of that I am certain.
“Mr. Šain,” I say in an unfamiliar voice.
Here, in the courtyard, enclosed in high stone walls, where the light is soft, transparent, for an instant I feel (mistakenly) that I have finally, after many years, sat down beside water.
He hasn’t heard me. The bell in the tower is ringing more loudly—for St. Fjoko—and over the top of the carob tree, crammed with black fruits, I see the turquoise of the sky being squeezed out by the dense evening indigo.
“I need to ask you something.”
“Dada, my dear?”
“Did Daniel ever contact you, after you went away, did he send you any message, letter, email, did he ever get in touch?”
The catfish twitches, barely perceptibly.
Then, as though to himself: “Why are you tormenting yourself with this? He’s no longer here, you have to think of the living—yourself, your mother.”
“It’s better not to know some things,” said Ma, and look where her desire not to know has got her. That’s what I think, saying nothing.
He pulls out a used handkerchief with a blue edge and blows his nose loudly.
“Why, how would he have found me, I kept moving, from Brela to Rotterdam and then… No, I was all over the place, until I completely ran out of money. I was even, I was even robbed, yes.”
“What about email?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs his shoulders and returns my gaze. “I rarely use it, if I have to,” he says. “I’ve got a bit old,” he says, and smiles somewhat bitterly.
The tortoises have separated and are now at two different ends of the garden. They hardly move. What are the chances of them never finding each other again?
“I’d never have done anything to hurt him. It may seem strange to you now, because Dani was almost a child, and I am, obviously, already almost an old man, but he was my best friend.”
As he speaks, the huge man quivers, closes his eyes and opens them wide, swallowing air:
“The fact that he got involved with some lads, a gang, you may know that…
… I warned him, that’s not the right company for you…
… He didn’t come back here again, anyway…
… They don’t like being lectured…
… Perhaps I could have done more…
… I always wonder…
… I could have done more…
… After that, I don’t know…
… In any case, you know what happened to me before I left, I was beaten up, half to death, for God’s sake…”
As he speaks, he clasps his large hands like a sick person suffering from some acute physical discomfort.
A few unexpected large drops of rain tinkle onto the crockery and drive the magic scarab beetle out of its hiding place under a plate. It stops on the white tablecloth like a forgotten amulet.
“Dung-beetle,” the vet comments drily.
“Yes,” I reply briefly.
My throat is constricted, as though he has stuffed it with those dirty, crusty rags, now dripping on the washing line before our eyes.
“It must be hard for the rain, once it starts, to stop. It would be for me. Like when you’re a child and pee in your sleep, without feeling shame or stopping,” says Karlo Šain.
We’re protected by the treetop and the porch, while beyond us it’s pouring.
I think fleetingly that Ma has probably not taken the shoes off the steps and now they’re getting wet.
I feel the piece of paper in my pocket, the envelope with the stamp; the image of Laika and postmark Perm—where’s that and why there—typewritten, a letter that was late and arrived after Daniel’s death. If I got it out now, would Karlo Šain say it was his? He would, I think, and I push the envelope under the tray on the table. Let him find it.
If this reply exists, there must also be a letter that preceded it. I’ve waited for four years for Herr Professor and that letter of Daniel’s, or email, whatever, his voice. And Karlo Šain says it doesn’t exist, that Daniel’s letter doesn’t exist. He looks me in the eye, lying. And mumbles about the rain.
Prof Šain says no letter of any kind 
. I send my sister a message later.
Reply: What did I tell you! Leave him be. Who knows who wrote the letter.
For a time I look blindly at the screen, peed on by the downpour.
Like hell there’s no letter. And he’s the one. What other idiot would still use a typewriter.
Yet another one of those hottest and longest summers in our lives—the last prewar one. The sea blossomed and during the day the heat made it stink horribly of decay and sulphur, so during that whole unbearable time we bathed only at night in twinkling phosphorous.
Our father died at the beginning of August. It was the summer in the middle of which our time snapped and became forever unstuck, divided into before and after. It was impossible to put that broken, scattered time back together, or even connect its parts, which is what I keep trying to do.
During those days, the song of billions of cicadas and grasshoppers was transformed into a steady sound that stupefied, into afternoons that boiled noisily and into nocturnal effervescence. Our father told us that if you woke up early enough and went down to the sea, you could hear the seaweed cracking and emitting from its wounds a sticky juice like honey.
“They use it to sweeten tea and spicy foods in Mexico,” he said.
That man had learned everything he knew about the world beyond the Settlement from films.
They sent him home from the hospital three weeks ago. He is dying in the big double bed, in the light, airy room on the first floor. If I wake at night, I can hear his alveoli wheezing, his lungs separating, and a poisonous sticky juice like honey leaking into the cavities.
My father’s window, full of sky, is the only one in the house that looks out onto Long Street. Today is St. Fjoko’s Day, the town feast day, and on the corner table are pieces of used cotton wool and a dish of dewy figs.
This is the feast day, when trombones, a bassoon and cymbals sound, tables and chairs are taken out onto the square and in front of houses.
In the evening, fraternities, Fjokans, put on the specially adorned robes of their brotherhood with hoods and an embroidered gold-and-scarlet badge on their chests and process one after the other behind the crossbearer, behind two candle holders, behind the little silver box on a brocade cushion.
After them come nuns and women from the Choir of St. Lisa, singing “Christ on the Beach” and other such hymns. Their freshly shaved husbands carry large candles that sway, so they look like the burning masts of foreign yachts down in the Little Lagoon. Male aromas of incense and Pitralon spread around.
The largest candle, the Leader, was supposed to be carried by our father, but that’s impossible because of his illness and imminent death. Death has settled behind his pillow like the monkey, disguised, I could see.
Daniel had gone regularly, almost every day, to the fraternities and asked to be the one to carry it, but the Fjokans said he wasn’t strong enough and that “he should definitely come back in two or three years’ time.” In the end they gave in, nevertheless.
It was carried in seven circles, up and down, then down and up Long Street. When he couldn’t do any more, a large man would take the candle over, that’s what the men from the fraternity arranged, Daniel said.
“I’ll manage six,” said Daniel seriously. Ma was angry; she thought it was a bad idea.
“Maybe all seven!” he said to me and my sister, later.
They were hot days when the algae were blooming, in which the world as we had known it broke away from our future like part of the Red Sea on the poster for The Ten Commandments on the wall of Braco & Co., while we stayed for a little longer in between, on dry land, perplexed, but careless, cheerful, and foolish.
That morning, on St. Fjoko’s Day, I cut my hair.
Little flame by little flame, the breadbasket filled with fire and when Jill went to sleep in it, I saw that our fur coats were the same, of a similar color and softness.
This was no ritual, but just a case of “putting the moment into practice,” as Daniel would say—and I don’t think it had the slightest connection with what happened later. But it gave me the idea, I recall.
I was still a boy in those days. It was only the following year that my boobs began to grow. (For the rest of the summer, the girls from the Red Cross holiday home would whistle after me in the street and sometimes I liked it, and sometimes I didn’t.)
I stood for a long time in front of the mirror in Daniel’s room in the Fjokans’ festive costume, with the hood over my eyes: I’m taller than my brother, but not much, enough—I calculate. And similar, if I drop my shoulders like this and arrange my arms. And my hips, I observed.
“You can’t be the captain,” Daniel said yesterday as we were sailing on the dysentery sea. He was holding a palm-branch oar, I had the plastic one from the blow-up boat.
“Captainess!” I shrieked.
“You don’t get it, there’s no such thing. A captain, a cowboy, or a woman priest, they don’t exist.” He shrugged his shoulders. “What can I do,” he said, smiling, and I recall he had a tooth missing.
“What about Calamity Jane?” I yelled fiercely.
He thought for a moment.
“She turns into an ordinary lady in the end.”
I love the scene in which Calamity Jane appears at the top of the stairs in a dress and Wild Bill Hickock falls in love with her—I could rewind it and watch it for hours. He knows that, he’s teasing me. I gave him a shove with my oar so that he fell into the sea and I paddled to the shore.
That same afternoon I crept into his room: Indian patchouli sticks were burning to disguise the cigarette smoke. I smoked in the mirror under James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson from “a stupid, boring male story,” as I told Daniel. I had a bit of a rummage through his things, and then picked up the tidily laid-out Fjokan costume, put it on, and strutted about a bit.
Then, in front of the mirror it struck me. Why not? Something nice and warm rolled up to me and spread through the room. Why not?
“Biiii-iiitch!” yelled Daniel, a little later, down in my room, locked in.
“I’ll mur-der you! Honest to God!”
In vain—my room was in the cellar, deep in the rocks, in the house’s subconscious. I was sorry for my brother and felt disobedient, but not afraid. The Fearless Rusty.
The joy that buoys me up is strongest. It’s called excitement, a warm, golden ball in the belly and lower down, outside me. Like waking again and again. I’ll make it through all seven circles. It’ll be remembered. Oh, yes.
“Bravo, good for you,” I thought people’s eyes were saying in the procession.
“Bravo, Daniel, good lad, well done,” the dumb Fjokans would say afterward.
My body aches, everything in it hurts, every muscle and nerve, but the joy that buoys me up is far stronger. Behind the crossbearer with the cross, behind the two candle holders, behind the little silver box on the brocade cushion.
When we passed my father’s window for the fourth time, I summoned the strength to raise my head and look up: I wanted him to see me, and recognize me. He would be surprised, I imagined, and then he would burst out laughing. That was the scenario.
But the window was empty—a breeze had got up, so the blind was down.
The bells rang out again, and the greasy wax Leader slipped through my wet hands and broke dully on the ground.
At the top of the steps, in front of the door, my sister met me with red eyes and slapped me suddenly, palm open, on the cheek: “You’ve shorn yourself, you goat!”
From the bedroom we heard my mother’s thin squeal and the monkey slunk cackling through the open door, without anyone seeing it, apart from me and ginger Jill.
I broke away and ran after it down the hill to Long Street, toward the castle, though the lanes and dark vaults, to the slipway.
In the dusk, the procession was still milling about like ants when you tread on their anthill. They had stuck the Leader together with isolating tape, I observed from around the corner where I’d hidden. The monkey had crept where it was safest, among people, and vanished in the crowd under the wide skirt of one of the nuns, I saw.
I crawled unseen through the long empty rows of benches and white plastic tables on the square.
Down at the slipway, I’ll find Daniel, who has forgiven me.
“Sorry,” I’ll say. And it’ll be sorted.
There he is, my brother: he’s picking up seagull feathers for an Indian headdress, and we barely hear the sound of a departing ambulance.