Belladonna Read online

  In a transparent plastic bag he was carrying dry food, biscuits for his cat which disappeared soon afterward. She was the last to go.

  He slipped. He has old shoes with frayed laces.

  Laces?

  We don’t stock them.

  Laces?

  We don’t stock them.

  Laces?

  What color?

  Black.

  No. Only red.

  Laces?

  What are they?

  Ties?

  What’s that?

  Cords?

  Cords?

  Shoelaces.

  Oh, shoelaces. We don’t have any.

  Ties, cords, shoelaces, bootlaces?

  What color?

  Black.

  Yes. How long?

  Twenty-four inches.

  No. Only forty-eight.

  Go hang yourself on those.

  He rushes out of the shop, the sidewalk glistens with rain, he loses his balance, the biscuits scatter, rolling over the smooth slabs, he lies face down, getting wet and watching his cat’s biscuits swell, the little brown dots in the shape of a trefoil on the smooth stone slabs cheerfully raising their heads like little mushrooms, sounds vanish, Who turned off the sounds? nice shoes, men’s and women’s, pass his head, he could stay like this, he could fall asleep in this rain, then someone lifts him. My foot fell, he says, my spine’s no use. He looks at his right arm, his wrist is bent at an angle of forty-five degrees, as though someone had broken a twig.

  Now that arm, lying in a gymnastic pose above his head, is being held by his other arm, while Andreas Ban waits for Dr. Molina to switch on the machine, to rub him with jelly, that heavy arm drags him down, it will turn him over.

  In the trauma clinic they tell him, The doctor is at lunch.

  The pain is off the scale.

  After sixty-seven minutes (his laces break, his shoes keep falling off) an oldish paunchy doctor arrives in a half-clean white coat from which a gray sweater with a rice pattern protrudes. He waits for the doctor to examine a dozen patients before he is called in. In the surgery there are two enormous posters, one on each wall. The Pope (the previous one) and President Tudjman.

  What are these posters doing in a fracture clinic? he asks.

  The doctor says, Who are you?

  I need both my arms for writing, fix it somehow, he begs.

  Then the doctor asks, Are you going to Leipzig, there’s a lot in the papers about the book fair in Leipzig, is Aralica going to Leipzig?*

  He takes an X-ray of his hand and wrist, and says,

  All the small bones are broken, go and get it set.

  That’s where they graft this horror onto him.

  Dr. Molina feels Andreas Ban’s thorax. When did you notice this lump?

  Are you going to give me good news or bad news? asks Andreas Ban while Molina circles over his chest.

  Molina is silent, silent for a long time, then he says, I’m afraid it will be the latter.

  His heart detaches itself. Andreas Ban feels his heart falling through his back and slowly sinking onto the floor beneath the exam table he is lying on. He turns onto his side and watches his big swimming heart pumping in the air as though it were panting, very slowly. With his left hand rounded into a ladle, he scoops up his heart and returns it to its rightful place.

  Dr. Molina says, Sit up and we’ll have a chat.

  Andreas Ban says, Fuck off, and walks out into the rain.

  He doesn’t know what to do with that diagnosis, carcinoma mammae, a tumor of one centimeter. Should he tell someone? He stands on the narrow sidewalk and watches the traffic. A boy passes carrying a small pink umbrella. A little girl in a wet yellow dress runs after him. They are laughing. At the corner, under eaves, a woman is frantically tapping out text messages, not looking at the screen as she taps, her eyes dart about as though something important was happening, but it is not. Another girl appears with a mobile, yelling into it ciao ciao ciao ciao ciao bye bye ciao bye ciao. Andreas feels like shaking her. The raindrops hurt the crown of his head like a Chinese torture, as if he were waiting in Venice in the prison on the Bridge of Sighs for that last drop to fall onto his brain, to finish him off. That drop does not come. He turns his head from left to right and counts the cars. He ought to have his hair cut.

  He has been invited to dinner, he has bought wine.

  Venice?

  The shop windows near the Rialto glow, Murano necklaces sparkle, both cheap and costly, very young and very old Americans yell, Yugoslav dinars are exchanged for peanuts. One should go to the island opposite, to Giudecca, where the gondoliers live, and glass blowers and fat Italian mamas, where people are poor, the streets firm, the trees green, and the fish come from the open sea. Where the children are grubby and loud.

  He kissed Zoja in a cheap hotel room coated with bedbugs, under dusty covers and damp sheets and it was good. In that rottenness, he imagined dead Elvira, decayed, her maggoty thighs gripping him, her one charred breast, which he sucked, which he bit until thick, dark blood ran from it. In a spasm, he pulled Elvira’s hair, elusive (nonexistent, fallen out from cytostatic drugs), and sticky as a cobweb. He kissed Elvira’s empty eye sockets until Zoja said, Andreas, that hurts. Soon afterward Zoja abandoned him. Or he abandoned her. They abandoned each other.

  It is twenty-five years that Elvira has been gone. For Leo, Elvira is a fairy tale that cannot be made real, an invented recollection, an imagined love. For Andreas, a ball of string that rolls around his chest, a closed ball whose melody is fading.

  Thirty-five years since the death of his mother Marisa.

  In men cancer of the breast is a very malignant cancer. The prognosis for breast cancer in men is significantly worse than in women. Of the total number of patients at any stage of the illness, 36 percent live for five years and 7 percent for ten.

  Marisa departs at fifty.

  Elvira at thirty.

  Father is ninety-two, he wants to die but he is not dying.

  Andreas Ban calls into the antiquarian bookshop around the corner. He often calls in there, has a coffee with Oskar and leafs through books. He brings old postcards, historical documents, black-and-white photographs, family “mementos” with famous figures from the world of politics, for the most part copies (he keeps the originals), clearing out his drawers. At the door, Oskar smiles. Should I get a haircut? Andreas Ban asks. Without waiting for an answer he says, I’ve got breast cancer. Oskar stops smiling. Cruising around the bookshop is a seventy-year-old, who then addresses Oskar in Italian, Avete delle vecchie fotografie famigliari? Among the photographs that Oskar lays out in front of the old man, Andreas Ban notices some that he had discarded, some of his own family, photographs from the beginning of the twentieth century, copies of sepia photographs of his great-grandmother about whom he knows nothing, not how she lived nor how she smelled, who is a complete stranger to him, and therefore unnecessary; he catches sight of some distant uncle in hunting boots, with a curled mustache, he does not know what he was called, he looks at those relatives, those tiny flat figures and at the old foreigner dipping into the little pile of ghosts, then hears him saying, Ecco la mia nonna, ho trovato la mia nonna, he says, Comprerò tutto. Andreas Ban says nothing, he is thinking of his breast. The old man leaves the bookshop with a heap of paper-people crumpled in a plastic bag, and Oskar says, He’s from Trieste, he comes regularly, looking for his relatives.

  He’s bought my kin, says Andreas Ban, strangers’ lives.

  Three years have passed since then. The situation was new then. For Andreas Ban it had been the third new situation in the space of a year. After that more and more new situations kept coming, as far as the eye could see. The first situation had to do with his spine, a year earlier, when his instep had collapsed. He had begun to fall apart. His body was falling apart, and with it his days began
to dwindle.

  In recent times, people have begun to write more and more about the body, the body as a geographical map, the body that remembers, the body that punishes, the fat body, the thin body, the muscular body, the flabby body, the body that loves, the cult of the body, the cleanliness of the body, the body and its signals, the body that dictates, determines, organizes, the body that rebels. The body that surrenders? It is mostly women who write about the body, about the fact that not only do they have bodies but that they are their bodies. He is beginning to find this irritating. Andreas Ban is convinced that between him and his body a constant war is being waged, over which is the stronger. Andreas Ban can go hungry, he can go without sleep, he can stay still, he can do as he pleases with his body. He has only to find the control buttons.

  The woman sitting next to him in the clinic slurps and clicks at regular intervals. Her dentures are loose. He would like to say, Madam, fix those castanets in. Or take them out. Everything irritates him. The voices surrounding him pierce his brain like needles, set off a storm in his chest, create echoes in his ears. Otherwise, now, when he is alone, it is quiet in his head. No one speaks, nothing can be heard. Now and then a thought sneaks into his skull, whirls around slowly then evaporates. Danger comes from outside.

  * * *

  * Ivan Aralica (b. 1930). A pro-regime novelist and essayist during Franjo Tudjman’s government.

  Walking becomes increasingly painful, so he makes the rounds of clinics on his crutches. He goes through everything, through all the examinations, all the analyses, it all drags on interminably. After the X-ray of his spine, the radiologist erupts from his office shouting, This is the spine of a ninety-year-old, shame on you! Andreas Ban says, My bones hurt, could it be a kind of cancer? I don’t know, says the radiologist, go and get a CAT scan immediately. After ten days of uncertainty, Andreas Ban discovers that he does not have bone cancer, but that he will have to have an MRI for which you have to wait at least six months.

  When he had undergone that too, that magnetic resonance, they told him, Go to a neurosurgeon to see what your next step should be. All in all, for ten months he had been totally preoccupied with his spine, his deformed vertebrae, his pain and how to overcome it when he lay down, when he sat up and, the most terrible of all, with every step he took.

  He has begun to limp. So, now, as he walks, he sways. Like a mast, as Kiš would say.

  The neurosurgeon looks at his MRI, while a dreadful, pulsating silence gets into his ears where it beats to the rhythm of his heart. His jugular vein throbs crazily like a mechanical hen pecking at grain.

  How much shorter are you? asks the neurosurgeon.

  He knows he has lost two inches. Fortunately, he had been tall so he could permit himself that reduction. He is now a decent height, six foot one, which still annoys small men. It would have been terrible if he had gone from five foot seven to, say, five foot five, he would have become a midget and thrown his weight around in company; as it was, he could still stand.

  You have severe degenerative changes, the neurosurgeon continues, how do you manage to walk at all, this is your spine, the spine of a ninety-year-old, these are the vertebrae of a ninety-year-old, how old are you, how old are you, how do you manage to walk at all?

  Then he asks the neurosurgeon, What do we do now?

  The neurosurgeon says, We could remove two or three or four vertebrae, as many as necessary, and replace them with steel, or rather Teflon vertebrae. On either side of your spine, we would insert a steel mesh around which we would have to wrap your muscles, mind you, says the neurosurgeon, that’s very painful, that’s three months of unbearable pain, it’s a difficult operation and the outcome is uncertain.

  Don’t sweat so much, you’re very pale, says the neurosurgeon. There’s a more conservative variant, rehabilitation, electric currents, waters, exercises, magnets, you need to devote time to your body.

  And then? asks Andreas Ban.

  Then you’ll be able to mess around in the garden, says the neurosurgeon.

  I don’t have a garden, Andreas Ban observes, and I don’t like messing around in gardens, what would you do?

  I’d mess around in the garden, says the neurosurgeon, I enjoy that, I adore messing around in the garden, it relaxes me. Then he adds, Without an operation, I give you four years.

  Till what? asks Andreas Ban.

  Till a wheelchair.

  Then, in 2007, Andreas Ban takes out a loan and goes for treatment. Social Security refuses to pay for the treatment because he is not yet incontinent and can still limp around unaided.

  The receptionist at the hospital says, You must be glad that you haven’t got a brain tumor.

  He says, Should be,

  and the receptionist says, Yes, you must be glad,

  he replies, You should be glad,

  and the receptionist raises her voice, Don’t get upset, you must be glad.

  So, he is supposed to be glad that he doesn’t know when he’s going to die.

  When Yugoslavia fell apart, Andreas Ban was still working in Paris. He is sent to Paris because he is trusted, because he was born in Paris after the war, when his father, a national hero and bearer of a 1941 Partisan medal, was sent there to establish connections. Cultural, political and economic. His parents did not register him as a citizen of the French Republic, that would presumably have been unpatriotic, so his arrival in the world was recorded in the Yugoslav Register of Births. When he was old enough to change this state of affairs, he had more urgent business, so becoming a Frenchman didn’t cross his mind.

  When Yugoslavia was falling apart, Andreas Ban returned to Belgrade from Paris, where else would he go? And is dismissed. Now you are an enemy of the state, a Croat. He has his name, he does not consider the fact that he is a Croat significant. But someone does. Andreas Ban gnaws at his savings, which are minimal. Close friendships crumble. His colleagues become supporters of the Serbian nationalist leader Šešelj. Andreas Ban roams the streets, visits graves. Acquaintances who meet him are surprised he is still there, in Belgrade. Aren’t you with the Croatian national guard? they ask. Now, from Belgrade, he could be mobilized, they could tell him, Go to Croatia and liberate Yugoslavia. They could tell him, Feel free to go and kill.

  He grew up in Belgrade, Andreas Ban had lived in Belgrade from his seventh year, he got his degree in Belgrade, from Belgrade he went to do national service in Skopje, Third Military Sector, Marshal Tito Barracks, VP 4466, from Skopje he returned to Belgrade, he got married in Belgrade, and it was in Belgrade that he buried his Elvira, Elvira the pianist who on her deathbed said, I love you as if I were Madigan. What was he supposed to do? Kill himself like Sixten Sparre? He buried his mother in Belgrade, she had said, When I die, take me back to my Split, to the sea. They didn’t take her back. They did cremate her, but they didn’t take her back, it would have been a nuisance. Now that cheap urn has probably disintegrated, peppered with little holes through which the ashes seep, through which tiny grains of Marisa have long since spilled into the earth. But the pine they bought in a pot for New Year 1979, a little pine, a pinelet, which they planted by his mother’s head, is now a big, powerful and imposing pine into whose roots Marisa has grown, light, like fine dust.

  In Skopje they live like lords, and in Skopje Andreas Ban acquires the nickname “Lord.” In the morning, Andreas Ban distributes bread around the barracks, in the afternoon he works in the office where they hand out passes for going into town, in the evening he organizes the duty roster, guards and fire officers, but mostly he reads. He spends his free evenings in bars or at the theater. In winter, a heavy, suffocating cold rolls through the barracks’ rooms until the soldiers chop enough wood to warm the stoves and make their fingers flexible again. Otherwise, there were days, especially the snowy ones, when that Skopje Marshal Tito barracks, with its ghostly silence, darkness and desolation moved into the world of Edgar Allan Poe. When th
e soldiers were absent en masse, and most often at weekends, the sound of dripping water from the collective but empty bathrooms drove Andreas Ban crazy in the little office where he was preparing lectures for the “sprogs” and materials about mechanics which he later turned into handbooks that “his” No. 2 platoon used for studying. The dripping echoed in the low washbasins resembling water troughs for cattle like the ticking of a nonexistent clock, marking time that did not pass, that was stifled by its own resonance.

  Andreas Ban could now recollect his military days in detail. The way the younger ones, the “sprogs,” called the “old” soldiers “old ruts,” “old hooks,” “nails” or “old bones.” “The old hook lies under his Deutz, while a sprog scratches his balls,” they used to sing to one another. They used to call him “grandpa” too, he was twenty-four. He could remember the way they protected the homeland from the enemy who was just about to attack, but never did, or the registration office in front of which he planted roses with Albert from Osijek, Andreas Ban could remember “Tarzan,” the barracks commander, who swayed like a dry twig, “Fall in!” or “Mouse,” a diminutive blue-eyed Captain 1st Class who stank of sour cabbage. He could remember the clap contracted on a one-night stand when Ruta the Strumpet shrieked Yes, oh yes, let me have it . . . But he refuses to remember. He had inhaled anxiety and vomited anxiety. He had sunk into the morgue of time, he had become a cadaver wrapped in senselessness, in idiocies, in the grotesquely devised absurdity of soldiering with an aura of the dramatic. He refuses to remember. He is repelled by those forced reminiscences with which, for years after they finish their military service, men in bars feed their masculinity, their eternal friendships, while those eternal friendships have rapidly dispersed into nothingness, into shabby memories. Then into war.

  While they are in Skopje, waiting for their imaginary enemy who is supposed to come from Albania via Prizren, in ancient T-59 tanks (Chinese copies of the famous T-55s), Enver Hoxha hysterically sows bunkers all over his country and south of Tirana develops the airbase Berat-Kuçovë with hunter-bomber squadrons, MiG-15/19 and 21, F-13 version, all Chinese products, with the mark F-5/6/7.