Belladonna Read online

  Printz leaves Budapest. The tourists sing. The tourists also leave Budapest, they return to the town on the confluence of two polluted rivers, they return from their excursion, from their shopping trip. The tourists are happy, you can see, because they sing. Budapest is a beautiful city. Printz hears shells falling on the other side (Vukovar?), he sees bombers flying over there, the woman beside him in the bus says, The Hungarians have excellent cheeses and cheap salami, no worse than our Gavrilović, not at all. Is Gavrilović a Serbian name?

  Meanwhile Andreas’s friend Bruno from Budapest drives him to Maribor, where he takes the train to Croatia. Andreas Ban arrives in Croatia with one pair of pajamas, three pairs of underpants, two shirts, toiletries and fifteen hundred German marks to begin his circumscribed, trimmed-back life. Earlier, Andreas Ban exchanges his elegant Belgrade apartment for this neglected barracks with single-glazed, peeling windows in which the panes rattle because the putty falls out in lumps, partly it’s age, partly the din of traffic and the yelling of idlers walking the streets, he had exchanged his apartment for this one with the yellowing six-foot double door, impossible to clean, the ceiling that leaks, soaking the electric wires whenever the pipe upstairs detaches itself from the washing machine or dishwasher, dug-up parquet with burn marks from wood fires like black bugs of various sizes. And he can never again buy a car. So he is immobile, he could only escape by submitting to the poor and infrequent bus timetables, he could not even consider trains because where he now lives there exists a railroad station at which almost nothing and no one ever arrives, from which almost nothing and no one ever leaves, where even the clock has stopped ticking.

  Clara wanted to help. His cousin Clara brings warm pie and beer while Andreas strips wallpaper with gigantic mountain landscapes where falling water murmurs, with landscapes of nature that fill the spacious rooms with darkness and cold, as he paints and arranges his furniture, none of which goes together, the space becomes small, then small and displaced, lost in the space, as he and his son are lost in that space. At the same time, Andreas Ban runs from one school to another in order to register his nine-year-old Leo in fourth grade, he appeals to the Ministry responsible and its local branches, trying to convince the blinded officials of the idiocy of their demands that Leo first pass the exams in Croatian language, Croatian history and Croatian geography from the first, second and third grades, and only then will he be permitted to attend classes, to which he responds that in the first, second and third grades of primary school these Croatian subjects (apart from language) are not studied at all, what is studied is something that is senselessly called understanding society and nature, senseless because children in school do not learn anything intelligent about society or nature, rather what they learn is fairly grotesque, and sometimes monstrous, but they do learn how to kneel in prayer and how to be silent, because what leaps out of Leo’s reader is the idiotic, imbecilic and loathsome ditty by Pajo Kanižaj:

  I first cried in Croatian

  I speak Croatian

  I whisper in Croatian

  I’m silent in Croatian

  I dream in Croatian

  even awake I dream in Croatian

  I love in Croatian

  I love Croatian

  I write in Croatian

  when I don’t write I don’t write in Croatian

  everything I do is in Croatian

  Croatian is everything to me.

  Later, Pajo Kanižaj publishes ever more appalling creations:

  When Serbs stop lying,

  dry sticks will turn to herbs!

  Not all Serbs are Gypsies,

  but Gypsies are all Serbs!

  and then Kanižaj somehow disappears, maybe he falls into a sewer where, with other crazed Croatian rats, he flows into the backwaters of Croatian history, listening and biding his time.

  After Pajo Kanižaj’s poetic slap, nine-year-old Leo practices making Croatian versions of familiar words. He turns the spines of all ten volumes of his Cyrillic children’s encyclopedia to the wall and when he listens to music by Balašević, he tries to lock the loose-fitting windows that look out onto the underpass-overpass street. Only the bathroom window overlooks a stunted concrete playground with no children in it, a playground which must be reached through tunnels from the neighboring buildings, which Leo and Andreas do not even attempt to do. In the neighborhood there are no parks, no greenery, no children, no ball games, not so much as a swing.

  All told, this is a town with a restricted outlook, a town on the sea without a view of the open sea, a town which surveys its decrepit interior, its physical and social decay the way an inquisitive child picks at its belly button. This is a town with no silence, a town with a unique quantity of senseless, hollow noise into whose core pedestrians fly and are immediately deafened. This is a town that has transformed its pedestrian zone into a rural living room into which musicians drag their shabby armchairs from which yellowing foam rubber pokes, in which tents blast music which is not music, in which Croatian kitsch is sold, as though this town were set in the middle of an Arabian desert where at any moment sheikhs will ride up on camels or black steeds, visiting the wretched oases of the common people.

  Now it does not matter. Leo has gone. Now on the outside wall of this refurbished bathroom window that shuts admirably well, a strange (wild) plant grows, the seed of which was probably brought by the wind or a small quiet bird, and that little plant branches out and has pink flowers and Andreas Ban monitors its life wondering whether (when) it will wither. Like that film he saw when he was six years old, discovering many years later that it was a film based on O. Henry’s story “The Last Leaf,” in which a young painter is dying of pneumonia and as she’s passing away she sees through the window a wall overgrown with ivy and gazes at the wall and counts the leaves that fall from the ivy, while the wind blows and the rain pours and it becomes increasingly cold and the young painter tells her friend, When the last leaf falls, I shall die, and her friend brings an old painter who then, at night, on that bare stone wall, draws just one leaf, realistic, already a little wilted, motionless admittedly, but still, and after that the young painter gradually recovers, though soon afterward the old painter himself, soaked and frozen, dies of pneumonia. Perhaps that little plant growing out of the loosened bricks beneath the window of Andreas’s bathroom will decide not to wither, perhaps it will go wild, go mad and stick to the pane and spread its stems until it covers the window, until the bathroom becomes completely dark, until the whole apartment grows dark and he, Andreas Ban, is left even more constricted in his prison.

  All right, Leo does go to school. Andreas Ban comes across a head teacher who is a Czech by birth who says, Bring your son, we’ll register him. Fortunately, Leo does not learn either how to whisper or how to keep quiet or how to dream or how to love in Croatian, he completes his schooling, attends courses in computer design and film workshops from which his spirited documentaries emerge, he swims, travels, grows and becomes strong, gets a degree in medicine and — leaves. He said, I’m off. Andreas Ban said, Quite right, off you go. For Andreas Ban an enormous emptiness descended then, the apartment trembled with its resonance. Like dominoes, little tiles with fading images of the past fall onto his chest. For a long time he wears a washed-out T-shirt designed ages ago for an American theater for the deaf and dumb by his friend Oskar. He dreams of a screeching woman’s voice threateningly telling him, Praise be to God! and freezes. He looks at their two bicycles, Leo’s and his, leaning against each other, as if Leo were here. Then, somehow unexpectedly, in that tomb that had walled itself in of its own accord, little lights begin to glimmer in the corners. Those lights flicker from Leo’s shelves, sending out rays of warmth, as though waving. Then peace settles in Andreas Ban, a small happiness that whispers, It’s all good, we made it.

  Where did he get to? Clara.

  Clara tries to drag Andreas Ban out of his unshakable atheism into her uns
hakably religious world through stories about regular town meetings and philosophical-religious debates with educated Church figures, patres nostri and patres vestri. Today Andreas Ban thinks, I could at least have listened to her, wondering whether Clara could have been a distant echo of Simone Weil, but presumably he would have guessed that. Clara had two sons and a husband, she did all the housework herself, she had her medicine and her music and black hair that was rapidly turning gray. Some ten years later, he met her walking alone in town, slowly, almost aimlessly, I’m looking for a Turkish coffee pot, she said, which sounded senseless.

  Then they find that Clara has a brain tumor and she dies six months later, frightened. He knows several others with brain tumors, he had watched them go, Angelo, Esteban, Julia. He had also known people with metastases on the brain, he had watched them lose their sight, lose their sense of balance, lose their words and leave little notes around to remind them of life. He had watched them become paralyzed, stagger then fall — Ivan, his femur breaks, eroded, loose, so it tears the muscles, pierces the skin and protrudes, and Erik, completely paralyzed, who opened his eyes wide and let out animal cries because he could no longer speak.

  Clara remained an enigma to Andreas. His relations on his mother’s side possess a warehouse of undiscovered secrets, because his mother had no space for telling stories. His father had confiscated the space. But from time to time some of his distant relatives step into that storeroom, that place where little family boxes are kept, and start rummaging around. They search for silent mementos which disintegrate when touched, all the singed remnants of a former life. So, in the flea market of a used-up age Andreas Ban sifts through the junk bequeathed him by these unknown people, quite unexpectedly. At funerals, at weddings, at pointless, mercifully rare festive lunches, they throw into his pocket or onto his plate small packaged riddles, whose thin veins, brittle and filled with now diluted (family) blood, stretch toward him. They destroy his concept, his philosophy of life, they loosen the screws that hold the framework of his life together, they penetrate the picture and bring commotion into his molehill. The greater the distance, in time and space, the better, the simpler.

  When she was taken ill, Clara called him, Come so we can talk, she said, everyone on my father’s side has disappeared, just a hole left. He went. Once. Her arm was paralyzed (because of the tumor, which radiation had not diminished), her head was bald, with a scar from the operation that had not succeeded, Let’s light up, she said, and asked him, How old are we? He called a few months later, at the moment of her death. She has just passed away, said her son. For years Andreas Ban has been trying to interpret that moment.

  Twelve months later Andreas Ban has merged with his serious degenerative changes, he has become one great degenerative change that can no longer run and climbs stairs with difficulty, he has become a limping degenerative change waiting for that degenerative change to ossify, to pitch camp, to stiffen in his body which will grow ever more crooked and bent, completely degenerated. So he’ll wish to get rid of it. As they wanted to get rid of that art. When he moved to the small provincial town he considered to be somehow degenerate, to have, no one knows how or when, degenerated, some people said he had infiltrated it, which could mean that he was quite wrong, that the town had not degenerated at all, but that he had degenerated because his assessment of life in this town was erroneous, because if he had infiltrated it, then he was an infiltrator (like a tuberculosis bacillus) who had nested in the healthy fabric of the province and was destroying its vigor, its life. Such relativity offered Andreas Ban little solace.

  In fact, many people limp. In streets all over the world people limp, some even energetically. The people who stagger most are little old ladies in brown coats with tight perms, for the most part obese. Under their coats one can see their diamond-patterned home-knit sweaters, dark-colored sweaters, sometimes also dark red. Red-brown combinations are the ugliest and the most common. Those are old people’s combinations. Until he began to limp, Andreas Ban thought that lame people did not walk, he thought that lame people just tottered around their rooms and along their dark corridors (as he does now), because that was where they were safe. But no, lame people like to go out and hobble around publicly. In public, lame people have priority, the public takes pity on them and with time lame people may become arrogant and inconsiderate lame people. He tells himself, Andreas, mind that does not happen to you. Then, as he staggers, he imagines that he doesn’t limp at all, he alters the expression on his face into a healthy, smiling expression and puts his scowl into his pocket, to take out when things get difficult. So, he began to go out. He accepted his limping as a normal state. That was four years ago. Some young people limp. Men limp too.

  The therapy in Opatija wasn’t successful.

  He spent the whole day counting: lengths of the pool times twenty-five meters up to a thousand, exercises, one-two, one-two, up to ten, in the course of which he could listen only to orchestral music because the vocals of the music that played in the rehabilitation rooms would have distracted him, confused him as he counted and he would not have known where he had got to. At that pointless Opatija spa, he spent half the day at the entrances of different clinics, waiting. This sort of current, that sort of current, ultrasound, magnets, underwater massage, walking between room 33 and room 45 and back, trying to read Hrabal, but the patients were loud and confessional, cacophonous, and their voices fell onto Bohumil as though he were a springboard, then flew into Andreas’s head where they multiplied into vomit.

  The dinners are unimaginative, alternately turkey and frozen hake and there are Slovenians who behave as though they are on a skiing holiday. In the pool, few people actually swim; both men and women, especially women, just float and chat, then they stand under the jets, close their eyes, stretch their lips into an obtuse smile and sink into the bliss of chlorinated water at thirty-three degrees.

  Oh, how he wished he could swim long long distances as he had when he was training in fifty-meter pools, when his arms and legs did their work, calmly and rhythmically, harmoniously, when his breathing embraced his body, protected it, drew him toward infinity, not like today when he wrestles with it, when it rages within him, ravages him, constricts him, hisses as he tries to fall asleep and, shallow as his breathing is, insidiously crushes his lungs which are unable to open and take into themselves the elusive, colorless but miraculous food for the mind, ordinary air. When he used to swim long distances, in pools and outside them, toward the open sea, for hours, he leafed through books, read poems, sang, wrote, sculpted, but now, with no air, he is completely drying up from the inside, contracting, diminishing into a quiet, uninhabited, almost cataclysmic microworld.

  In the course of those three weeks spent in Opatija, he watched all the TV shows he had not known existed, he did not read a single book, he strengthened his stomach and back muscles, while his spirit fell ill. But when he got home, he wrote. He still wrote.

  He skips the first phase, the phase of rejecting the illness, he’s no fool. So he confronts it. The second phase, the phase of anger (fuck off!), settles down, he no longer shouts at the doctors, he’s tame. He rushes into the third phase, bargaining, with one sentence — Give me ten years — to which Dr. Toffetti replies, Perhaps. But then you’ll come back for another ten, and Andreas Ban falls silent. He had hoped, if the tests didn’t show disturbing changes, deterioration, that he would be able to accept his condition and live with it, and thus avoid that enigmatic phase, depression, which is hard to tame. Andreas Ban knows all this, he has studied books and observed cases in the course of his professional life. So, with the ultrasound diagnosis, with the little photograph that Dr. Molina handed him, the following day Andreas Ban goes for a needle-core biopsy, they give him an appointment at once, breast cancer in men is after all a rare (aggressive and fairly malignant) phenomenon. Ah, great, one of the oncologists lets slip, at last I’ll be able to show this to my students. Breast cancer in a man never comes our w
ay.

  The surgeon, Toffetti, inserts a wide needle with an extraction mechanism into Andreas Ban’s breast. Andreas Ban turns his head away, he doesn’t want to look, but he hears the needle click and feels it grab a small piece of the tumor. Then again, and again, and again, the soles of his feet are cold, his nose itches, his arm under the cast itches, he doesn’t breathe. In ominous silence, Dr. Toffetti collects the samples of that not yet entirely aroused substance that has settled inside him, conceived who knows when, who knows in what hustle, bustle, house-move and impecunity, perhaps in the course of some great solitude that threatened, like a flood, to drag him down to depths so deep he would not be able to surface, but it did not, it left him, as in a film, beached, in semiconsciousness from which he did nevertheless extract himself. Then Dr. Toffetti exclaims, almost cheerfully, Oh, what a beautiful sample, big and compact, as though he were looking at a slice of Black Forest gateau.

  A week later, in Dr. Toffetti’s clinic, Andreas Ban reads the result of his needle-core biopsy as if he were reading a bad review of some melodrama. From the small piece of paper the word invasive flies up and, like a bullet, hits Andreas between the eyes. How invasive is it now? asks Andreas Ban. What has it attacked, where, how much has it attacked, he asks. If they are malignant, they are all invasive, says Dr. Toffetti with discreet irritation, as if to say Don’t try to be clever. Andreas is silenced, he is diminished, but diminished in a way that makes him want to lie down, curl up and pull the covers over his head, because his nose is getting cold and that annoys him.