EEG Read online

  EEG

  ALSO BY DAŠA DRNDIĆ

  in English translation

  * * *

  Trieste (2012)

  Leica Format (2015)

  Belladonna (2017)

  Copyright © 2016 by Daša Drndić

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Celia Hawkesworth

  All rights reserved. Excerpt for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Originally published in Croatian by Fraktura in 2016

  Published in arrangement with MacLehose Press, London

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (ndp1437) in 2019

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Drndić, Daša, 1946– author. | Hawkesworth, Celia, 1942– translator.

  Title: E.E.G. / Daša Drndić;

  translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth.

  Other titles: EEG. English

  Description: New York : New Directions, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018046578 (print) | LCCN 2018056251 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780811228497 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811228480 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Intellectuals—Croatia—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PG1619.14.R58 (ebook) | LCC PG1619.14.R58 E3813 2019 (print) | DDC 891.8/235—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013734

  eISBN: 9780811228497

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  For Maša and Gojko

  As we endeavor to distance ourselves from our torments, madness is our last refuge.

  What saved me was considering suicide. Had I not considered suicide, I would certainly have killed myself. So, the desire to die is my one and only concern; I have sacrificed everything to it, even death.

  —E. M. Cioran, Cahiers 1957–1972,

  Paris, Gallimard, N.R.F. 1997

  Of course I didn’t kill myself.

  Although silent suicides lurk all around. They skulk. Silent suicides are not violent suicides, they are gradual, ongoing. My sister Ada is killing herself silently. And I sometimes kill myself slowly, I go through phases, then I pull myself together, get over it. Eating too much can be a silent suicide, as can starvation, often observed in ambitious and insecure anorexics or old people who have lost their teeth and their place in life, so they stare at the TV screen, eating bananas and ice cream, if they can afford them. But starvation can also be forced, when people are killed by someone else (silent murder), when people don’t want to be hungry, but are.

  Recently, in a transnational shopping center, a man ran away from a guard with a little piece of steak in his jacket. The guard caught up with him and the packet of meat ended up on the ground. The man, whom the guard called a thief, managed to get away, but without the meat. Maybe he should have settled on a cheaper option, like another man who went for chickens. He slunk into the basement of a family house in Veliki Grđevac and removed from the freezer forty kilos of frozen chickens and ducks worth nine hundred kunas. It was reported in the paper that the owners had not anticipated a thief would steal their chickens and ducks. They probably thought that, in a village of 3,313 inhabitants, 80 percent of them Croats, everyone loved each other, they all had enough to eat.

  Maybe it’s safer to collect snails and sell them, and then use the proceeds to buy something to eat, polenta for example, or maybe to pay the electricity bill. The “policemen” of the European Union do not prohibit this; on the contrary, they encourage such initiatives. The snails have to be collected in April (that’s what T. S. Eliot thinks as well), because it usually rains in April, so snails slide smoothly, they get excited, emerge from their hiding places and then snail collectors can catch them easily. Snail collectors advise taking only adult snails, of thirty-four millimeters or more, because tiny snails are no use. So, snail collectors collect snails, then they sell them to snail dealers who pay half a euro for a kilogram of collected snails, then the snail dealers distribute them through their business partners to the European Union, to restaurants, where the snails, the escargots, are taken out of their shells, cooked in butter, wine or stock, along with garlic and other seasonings, then put back into their small houses and served to guests in portions of six to twelve, with little pliers for holding the shells and little narrow forks for removing the snails, and the guests then dunk them in thick aromatic sauces, smack their lips and say mmmmm.

  Silent suicides visit the young as well. Increasingly. Silent suicides come to those who are isolated, who have become social outcasts, and because they are social outcasts, they often turn to drink, or drugs, whatever, then they get ill and become depressed and sad. I know one (older) man who did kill himself, leaving a little note in which he had written: I need peace and this is the only way I’ll find it. He was sixty-seven.

  It has been scientifically proven that it is common for silent and invisible suicides to be committed by people who cannot accept change, who are a bit inflexible, cognitively rigid, unable to adapt, conservative (they cling to tradition, to the hearth, to the homeland, to the Church, and don’t let go), people who are obedient and emotionally repressed, so emotionally repressed that they forget to laugh, thinking they should mostly be serious; who are disciplined, who allow themselves to be disciplined, because they believe that’s the way to heaven. In the end they snap.

  But that’s not always how it goes. Those whose lungs and brains are constricted by such people, so they can’t breathe, they kill themselves too.

  Listen, get over it. What terrifies us about death is not the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life.

  Kundera

  I have something to say on that topic as well. Death is not an event in life, but is the end of my life. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way our visual field has no limits.

  Wittgenstein

  So, I didn’t kill myself. Nor did I leave. I didn’t abandon anything or anyone, everything around me is as it was; here are the books, here is the furniture and my small, select collection of glasses, here are my clothes — worn-out shirts (100 percent cotton), my pictures on the wall and my former self who no longer exists. Everything is here, only the space sways. I moved away to study small dead things, to observe close-up dead things that refuse to die. Arranged in impenetrable cages of milky glass, seen from outside, those dead things appear like quivering figures, opaque and inaudible, but alive. So, on my short journeys, I observed those huge cages, approached them, tapped on them, placed my hand on them to summon those imprisoned within, in case they came close to me, so I could speak to them through that thick milky-white glass, tell them I knew them, those imprisoned people, that I remembered their stories, that I was guarding their lives, but they just danced blissfully, disembodied in the silent vacuum. I remained invisible to them, external.

  Then I came back.

  There was a time when I had abandoned Rijeka, my language, my body, I was leaking away in droplets. Now I’m gathering up the remnants (of myself), this amalgam resembling the wet sand that children squeeze and make into wobbly figures, swollen, deformed and gray. Now I’m porridge-like, I’m porridge that is curdling, r
efusing a form, a porridge of squeezed organs, mush. Pith, pulp, formlessness. I glean rinds as well, vestiges of other people’s lives, to give them shape, even a distorted, deformed shape which occasionally emits a spark, and then I believe that not everything around me is utterly dark after all.

  The town has not changed. People still walk diagonally, with great amplitude. They turn suddenly across my path, they spring up in front of me, making me jump every time. Pedestrians do not stick to their left-hand side; they attack, they leap out, they destroy my rhythm, they move in a crippled, hiccupy rhythm so that my own gait becomes disorderly, jerky and erratic. Deformed. In the street around me people buzz, shout, bump into each other, steal those last remnants of my momentum, then I stop stock-still and let them pass, let them go, let them leave me a little bit of space so I no longer hear their empty chatter that makes my chest tremble and my brain undergo electric shocks that erase my thoughts. A few days ago I sat down to take a break, to have a coffee, to wipe out the remains of my morning nightmares, my swaying dreams. At the table next to mine at the little pavement café, three women were shrieking, grinding words as though rolling small pebbles around with their tongues and spitting degenerate phlegm in all directions, monster spirits that hovered in the air and rolled over the pavement, spreading across the space. What’s more, one of them kept hailing acquaintances and comparing her life to theirs from a distance of some ten meters, as though she was in a Neapolitan alleyway.

  Once, at breakfast in a hotel, I said to a man who had been carrying on a senseless and repetitive conversation on his cell phone at the top of his voice for a full fifteen minutes, Perhaps you could continue your conversation outside the dining room, and he replied: Have you never been to a hotel before?

  In a café, I once called out to a woman who was shrieking into her cell at the next table: Could you tone that down a little? She was stunned, she opened her eyes wide and said, Get lost, old man, fuck off, and carried on even more loudly than before.

  My friends tell me to calm down, which is a somewhat milder way of saying: You’re cracked.

  The din all around is appalling, it assaults one shamelessly. I have said before that I don’t know a noisier town than this. Sometimes the roar, the racket, the blaring, booming, thudding, rumbling, shouting, yelling, the general bawling — sometimes it’s so intolerable one feels like stopping in the middle of the street and screaming. Then maybe someone would pause, stunned into silence. The other day a woman came into the pharmacy, long bleached hair, disheveled, with black grime under her fingernails, wearing flowery harem pants, like pajamas, screeching into two cell phones at the same time, one white and one red, and the whole pharmacy reverberated. When she came to pay she was fifteen kunas short, so she went out but soon came back, still shouting into the little instruments pressed to her ears. Then a nun came in, exceptionally quiet by contrast, to collect her prescription medicine. Her Medazol vaginal suppositories had arrived (for trichomoniasis infection, among other things), but she too was short of some ten kunas. She rummaged through her purse, and the pharmacist asked deferentially (why deferentially?), Does that seem a lot to you? and the nun said, now rather more loudly, somewhat brusquely, One could do without. What did she mean, one could do without, why should it be done without? I immediately imagine this penguin-like believer on a gynecological exam table, is she half-naked or does she open her legs in her bat’s habit? There’s a story going around Rijeka about a nun who had six abortions. The gynecologist recommended contraceptive measures, but she said, That’s against my religion. Generally speaking, I have a problem with nuns. Outwardly, they look modest and humble, but they’re not. As soon as they’re touched (verbally), they become truculent, they raise their voices, sometimes they even become pugnacious, belligerent. Once I was waiting in a clinic, a long line, there was no hope of reading so much as a leaflet, partly because of the miserable light, partly because of the general clamor out of which from time to time someone’s penetrating voice emerged as patients described their ailments and exchanged test results in detail, blow by blow, then there she was, the nun: I’m in a hurry, she said, I can’t line up. Everyone fell silent, they looked at her piously, some even crossed themselves, as though the Virgin Mary had wandered into the waiting room. I said, I hope you won’t take long, and she pretended not to hear and went in. She stayed in the consulting room for forty-five minutes, it became so oppressive to be waiting in that darkness that even the pious grew restive. When she emerged, that venerable nun, I asked, Have you been getting prescriptions for the entire convent? She put her hands on her hips and said, That’s right. And fluttered away. Her glasses frame was more expensive than mine.

  *

  Then, in that clinic, I got annoyed again, because now it seems even quiet people annoy me, not only loud ones, and that’s no good.

  When I write and talk about the noise level in this town, some people feel personally affronted, as though they were the town, and in fact they are. But in the mere twenty minutes I spent in the pharmacy, three individuals asked for earplugs, wax ones, they said, we want wax ones because the wax ones fit better, they block the sound best, they said, not the ones for keeping out water, they said, water ones are rigid and they slip out, while wax ones can be molded to fit. There.

  Listen, a great many people smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are also not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought. Of course, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be so particularly painful. Those sudden, sharp cracks, which paralyze the brain, rend the thread of reflection, and murder thought. On the thinker the effect is woeful and disastrous, cutting his thoughts asunder, much as the executioner’s axe severs the head from the body.

  Schopenhauer

  Dog owners walking their pets are best, they don’t talk, they walk in a straight line and pick up shit.

  Writing Belladonna was a game. A jerky confession passably shaped by D. D. That had to be mentioned. For the sake of avoiding readers’ misconceptions, for the sake of truthfulness. As it is, there have been some misunderstandings, minor misunderstandings, granted, because everything has become minor — conversations, places, contacts, footsteps, time, and I myself — my breathing, my sight, my testes. My lungs feel tight. In any case, confusion has arisen. A confabulation of my life has come about, as though my life could be pressed between the covers of a book. As though I had lived unreality, warehousing other people’s stories in my innards, ingesting other people’s lives, whose odor, whose sorrow, whose insanity had begun to rot my insides.

  People say I have written an autobiographical book, Belladonna, or rather they say it is an autobiographical book by D. D., but it isn’t. Every novel is a novel about salvation, says Béla Hamvas, there is no novel without confession. So there.

  Autobiographical books don’t exist, autobiographies don’t exist, there are multigraphies, biographical mixes, biographical cocktails, the whole mélange of a life through which we dig, which we clear out, from which we select fragments, remnants, little pieces that we stuff into our pockets, little mouthfuls that we swallow as though they were our own. This trash heap (of lives) has swollen so much over the centuries that already it covers the surface of the globe and nothing in it can be recognized, nothing can be separated from it anymore, no uniqueness, no form, just overcooked husks, a mush which pulsates, barely, shallowly, before its exitus.

  Now, if one is to write, and what is written is of absolutely no use to the deformed human race, it is best to “invent” a story that has already been told with as many words as possible on as many pages as possible and blend it all into a child’s drawing. For the sake of comprehension
. For the sake of ease. For the sake of breeziness which will undulate like a current of air above the trash heap of our existence, to drive away (our) stench, so that, at least for a moment, we can believe that we are not ebbing away, that we are not leaking out like black slime. No allusions, heaven forbid, no metaphors or symbols, but sticking one’s finger straight into the shit. Make it simple. But I’m not offering “a story,” because I write about people who don’t have “a story,” not about those or for those who are looking for other people’s stories to find their own.

  A critic once wrote that Ban’s discourse is too moralizing. He is an inconvenient writer, he keeps punching the reader in the stomach.

  Celebrated writers can sometimes write truly worthless texts, but since they are held in high esteem, they are not only untouched by critics, but praised to the skies, even so they will be forgotten when they are no longer here, just as some who have been dead for twenty or so years already have. It happens the other way around as well. Which is no comfort, but rather a source of sadness or exasperation. Those who are immediately forgotten — writers, painters, women, men, musicians, scholars — are often all too easily plucked out of centuries-long oblivion and their names are bandied about everywhere by the present, mercilessly magnified after their own present had kicked them into poverty, madness, despair, suicide.

  When one writes, it helps to repeat oneself. It’s even desirable to transpose whole passages from one book to another, which is what I do from time to time, because people are chronically forgetful. And they are often surprised. When they are surprised, they cry out Imagine! The human brain is running out of space, running out of breath, becoming asthmatic, pale, the way the optic nerves grow pale until their final extinction, until blindness. Take music, for instance, the songs known as turbofolk, songs bus drivers play maniacally on intercity journeys and which are hummed by passengers who gaze at the loudspeakers, moving their lips in a trance.