Adios, Cowboy, page 10
“Come on, angel, take out your harmonica and play me something,” called an actor. I recognized him from a children’s program.
Our attention was drawn to a cloud of dust out of which emerged a cabriolet—the young lady in the light-colored suit, this time with her hair down and dark glasses on her face. The one who had picked him up that afternoon when I was watching them from my window. She gestured to him, pushing her dark glasses up. The boy stirred lazily, put his comb into his back pocket, and strolled toward her.
Damnation, they would say in a western.
“Ah, damnation, what can you do,” I said to my little motorized pony, watching the tall, handsome young man walking away from me, without ever having been mine.
Tame as a little dog, I reflected sadly.
I had the impression they were arguing, so I sparked the bike and sped off along the tarmac. I didn’t have much appetite for marital or nonmarital scenes, and besides, there was an important errand I had to make.
Behind the tents, the extras were drinking coffee that they poured from a thermos flask into cups—I observed—and the Gypsy, laying her feathers down beside her on a chair, read their fortunes in the grounds.
Several hens squawked when I revved the bike.
Through the window of the red car, in my rear mirror, Billy the Kid kissed his tanned sponsor.
* * *
I dashed through the early dusk toward the Last Chance, following the smooth curves of its neon aura. In front of me, in the distance above the wood, the skeletons of cranes loomed over the hill and high-rise buildings. My tires crunched on fir cones scattered over the ground by the night wind—a loud summer wind that drove me to go faster. Inland the wind has no sharpness, it excites you softly, but when I slow down, I can hear the rigging jangling on the masts down in the harbor and ships howling through their halyards.
The Last Chance is a place with a reputation: good and bad. Its dark door always swallows us gladly and afterward spits us, communicants, out into the calmer night.
Dutch Sonja opened this dive in the middle of the nineteen-eighties in a copse beside the sea, in Kućica—an abandoned beach complex below the former Red Cross rest home, halfway between the Settlement and the town center, on the shore. The place became famous because it stayed open until 4 a.m., when everything else was closed.
As children, we rarely went into that pinewood; by day a local exhibitionist tended to roam around there, and at night there was no lighting.
“Wanker,” that’s what we called them, those exhibitionists. There were two or three of them in the Settlement, and the girls used sometimes to see them in the company of their fathers or brothers, in cafés or garages. So the girls generally said nothing about it. Sometimes the wankers were their fathers or brothers. I knew four sisters who had a house beside a stream, below the highway. The oldest would blush whenever she saw us, even at school, she was always red in the face, that little girl we called Karolina-the-wanker’s-daughter, casually, as though we were saying Karolina the postman’s or the dentist’s daughter or Karolina of Monaco.
There’s something suppressed about the Old Settlement, “like venereal disease on the brain,” said my sister.
“Like Twin Peaks?” I asked, while my stomach gave a lurch backwards, as when I was a child.
The innocent and God-fearing Old Settlement, at the time of plant spraying, at the time of the intensive evaporation of smells, stank and crackled like a red-hot codfish in a pan.
“Man,” said my sister, “sometimes I think no one here fucks naturally or without a pang of conscience.”
“Catholicism in the Balkans, think about it, what a combination, that simply has to be perversion to the nth degree,” she said.
But people do fuck, because the streetlights never work, I reflected. The attempts to fix them were a serial fiasco, because some sensitive lover would always throw a stone from a copse and break the bulb. The only light was the neon coconut palm at the Last Chance, flickering on the deserted island of sighs, in the middle of the indigo night. The Chance changed its owners, closed, but in the end always reopened the entrance into its deep maw with the bright pink tongues of light reaching out from inside. For every lost creature on the road. For all of us.
I left the moped unchained outside the door and bowled in along with the wind. The little house immediately licked its lips.
From the doorway, I caught sight of the short figure with the baseball cap I was looking for. His short legs, out of proportion to his body-built torso and round head, were swinging comically from the bar stool. He was sitting at the poker game, pressing a red button with two fingers of one hand.
“Ahoy, long time no see,” the man at the bar winked by way of a greeting and gestured with his chin toward my dealer. “Hacker,” he said. “Plays better than the machine.”
Diana was smoking and putting clean glasses away.
The queer fellow swiveled on the stool to face me.
“Rusty? Henry George,” he said, offering me his hand cordially and formally, in the style of a traveling salesman, a young manager. He had glasses with thick lenses, but in fashionable frames, like TV hosts or teenage rap stars.
His little feet, size thirty-seven, roughly, in high Nike trainers, kept slipping off the footrest and dangling in the air. He was chewing gum; he’d blocked his ears with headphones.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if he started offering me porn movies, LSD, or decoded cell phones.
“This is my seventh coffee today,” said Henry George, licking his plastic spoon.
“Not good for the stomach,” I said for something to say.
“That’s what life’s like for us journalists, legend,” said the to-halfway-man-from-halfway-child.
His name had been appearing recently on the pages of corporation newsletters, I’d noticed. But any information, or disinformation, could be bought from him in various forms also privately; he was known for that.
“Here’s the money, give me the file, and I’m off,” I said.
He thrust a little black stick, with “DataTraveler” written on it under my nose.
“You’re jittery… What’s the rush, legend?”
I put the money on the table, picked up the USB stick, nodded to him, and left.
“Hey-hey,” I heard a voice behind me in the wood, after I’d already taken a few steps, and was trying to kick-start the engine and leap on—that was an old trick for starting crocks like my bike. The man behind me was Henry George, and I knew without looking around, he was coming toward me.
“Hey, legend, you’re the first person not to ask me which is my first name and which my surname.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I’ll buy you a drink.”
“No, thanks. My stomach’s not quite right,” I lied.
“No shit? As you like. Well, if you ever need me…”
He made that call-my-cell gesture with raised thumb and crooked little finger. I really hate that so I glowered.
“Hey, legend, don’t be mad at me, don’t forget you were the one who looked me up,” he said, winking.
“I didn’t say anything,” I said.
“Sure, but I get your drift,” he said. “Always the same, always ’enry the cunt. And who is it I get this shit for, if not for you, fine, honest folk. And what’m I, an ordinary supplier, small-scale merchant. People say, George, oh ’e spreads tales around, sells scandals, dubious type. But I’m a professional, a ’andler. I don’t ask superfluous questions, I work to order. If it wasn’t me, it’d be someone else, worse, wouldn’t it? Private landlord, showman, obliging fixer and bar girl, if you want, that’s me, nothing else! But the clientele wants celebrity soup and blood, that’s what they say. It’s all showbiz. And I do this for fun and dosh. Like everyone else.
“You’re presumably not so stupid as to think that people do bad things ’cause of some childhood trauma or some ideology, religion, doctrine, or motherfucker? I’ve got news for you, legend—folk like shit! They’re crazy for shit. For instance, people really like to ’ammer someone from time to time. It just comes over them. And if we’re being radical, think of wars, when their leash is loosened a bit and it’s, like, they’re doing it under the patronage of some God-the-father, like, they kill and rape for the ’omeland, church, king, some big wanker. The rabble can’t ’ardly wait for a war like a sports match to let off some steam. You don’t know who enjoys it more, the one watching and cheering or the one taking part.
“And I’m at the end of the food chain, supplier of fast food, courier of the fifth division. D’you want scandal or crime? Crime or scandal?
“You see, all these massacres, they’re all based on the entertainment industry, the whole thing is one great cheerful scandal, a bit of sex, a little good old ’orror, slitting, screwing and slaughtering. And then ’ere’s our controversial ‘enry, service on demand. You asked—look! No, legend, no one’s even trying to wrap it up nice now. And I’m your waiter, postman, commercial traveler, businesslike as a cash-machine, and entertaining as a clown…”
Then he disappeared somewhere behind the pine trees, on the short, swift legs of a dachshund, and with the head of a mole, Morloch—the underground proletarian.
Ma had put on lipstick, found quite a nice old hat of my sister’s, and, in a green dress full of daylight, she walked to the bus station, toting her straw basket as usual. She wasn’t going to the cemetery, she was going “to see her relative, Mariana Mateljan, to play rummy,” she said. She had turned down the offer of her relative coming for her, although “she offered several times,” she said. She wanted to walk in the nice weather. I hoped that she wasn’t going to one of her doctors—because, I realized, Ma had a whole network of physicians—to replenish her supplies of Normabel and Xanax.
“Mother’s an addict ,” a film trailer would sometimes flash through my head like an ax. Mother’s an addict.
“Aha, she’s showing signs of life,” commented my sister’s voice at the other end of the receiver, munching an apple when I explained where Ma was.
“Well great, that’s good news, very.” The apple crunched.
I had the feeling my sister wasn’t really listening to me, I heard the sounds of a clicking mouse from the other end.
When she came back from her rummy game at her relative Mariana Mateljan’s, Ma looked pleased. Her cards had “always come out,” she said. She washed her hands with a scrubbing brush, soap and water that steamed; took off her shoes and nylons and shooed ginger Jill out of her armchair with a rolled-up newspaper.
“Psssht,” she said.
The cat opened her glassy emerald eye, got up, and curled up a little farther away, on the rug under the television.
“You know,” said Ma, hanging her stockings over the back of the armchair, then sitting down, “at first, after he died, I spent years waitin’ for your dad to appear. For the last four years, I’ve been waitin’ for your brother too. I’ve waited for him every day from dawn to dusk but now I see he won’t be comin’.”
Her voice was calm and sure as though she was reading from a book. Her upper lip was sprinkled with moisture, I observed. Perhaps she was ill.
She sat in one of those armchairs of hers, worn by her back and behind, her makeup wiped off and barefoot like an old child, and I was overcome, quite out of the blue, by an unbearable desire to throw a vase or a slipper at her. My eyes, throat, and nose suddenly filled with tears. I sat down beside her, on the arm, and thrust the crisps I was eating under her chin. Pizza-flavored, it said. They tasted of Styrofoam and my saliva.
“What will they think of next,” said Ma, peering into the packet. “I’ll make a real pizza. Tomorrow. With real tomato sauce.”
She had brought two large plastic bags full of firm plum tomatoes from Mariana Mateljan’s garden.
I rubbed her elbow, cheeks, the woolly white growth on her nape. I hadn’t touched her for years, I reflected; pressing a kiss onto her cold, dry cheek. She still had the same smell of talc. It feels strange to touch Ma, I reflected. It was as though two skinless people were touching.
We sat on the terrace, skinning scalded tomatoes until night fell and our fingers became wrinkled and old.
Two or three drops escaped from my nostrils down my lips, onto the floor, and into the dish. Just as well my sister can’t see me, I reflected. Crying out of my nose.
Daniel, my brother, died in his eighteenth year, by jumping from a concrete bridge over the railway under a speeding Osijek–Zagreb–Split Intercity train.
He hadn’t appeared at school that morning; he had turned off toward the highway, beside the dry stream, then under it through the secret tunnel beneath the road and along the well-known gravel path to the railway, I can imagine it clearly.
At that time, Ma was a cook in the Illyria hotel canteen. Untillate in the day she made the roux and sauces, instant beef stew and dolce Garbo, which gave our sweetish-sour childhood its aroma. By the time she realized Daniel hadn’t come home, her son had been dead for hours.
Two policemen appeared at the door and when Ma opened it, they said: “Your son so-and-so is dead, he threw himself under a train,” and she slammed the door and called my sister.
“There are a couple of policemen outside, they say that our Daniel has killed himself. Please come and tell them to go away.”
I sometimes pass under that bridge, up and down, I clamber up and look at all that he saw: the housing estate devouring the golden prairie, the olive groves climbing onto the bare hill and the seagulls flying up from the rubbish dumps and from the direction of the slaughterhouse; vineyards spattered with Bordeaux mixture, of a poisonous, childish color, where dark grapes grow, along with hawthorn bushes full of berries and thorns.
“In Dante’s forest of suicides, in the Inferno, their severed limbs, or rather thorny branches, drip blood and words,” said Herr Professor, placing a cup over the scarab beetle, which the large raindrops had frightened and driven under a little china plate. And I tried to imagine my brother as a hawthorn bush I had seen under the bridge. An ordinary thorny bush in the sun: with no blood, without a single word, of course.
There’s nothing, that’s the worst of it.
Everything’s the opposite of what it seems: hell is a comfort to the living, while heaven is ordinary blackmail.
As children we had run across this same railway track innumerable times. We picked the flowers piercing through the stones scattered between the sleepers and brambles in the dry stone wall. The track was our frontier at the time of the wars with the Iroquois, this very place in front of the bridge where the St. Andrew’s cross is, and the trains whistle as they pass. They were brief battles, attacks from ambush, from behind broom shrubs, mostly without injuries. In times of peace and privilege brought by good weather, we went with our enemies to steal bitter cherries in the fields and searched around the pylon for telephone wires from which we fashioned bullets for catapults or else we made our way down to the cave—the old quarry—to the garbage dump and found interesting objects and foreign newspapers with wonderful photographs.
“Amazing ads,” Tomi Iroquois used to say thoughtfully.
So the afternoon would pass.
We would lay our ears on the tracks and listen to hear whether a train was coming. Around us sharp grasses of healing aroma gave off their scent and sunny bumblebees buzzed. Or the prairie lay silent scattered with morning frost.
So the autumn, and winter, would pass.
For the second evening running I go down to that house and sit in the dark in front of it, under the wild fig tree. All the fruit has fallen off and squashed on the stones. The Old Settlement is crammed with that grimy fruit—mulberries, hackberries, and figs—which means that the streets are sticky, full of flies and greasy stains.
Over the wall the Šains’ old house stares at me. There is nothing left of all of the grandezza that Mariana Mateljan raves about, apart from glittering fragments of glass on the facade and a few dubious paintings and details like the themes of those little poems with lots of vocatives.
“If there’s a reply, there must be a letter that preceded it,” I’ll go in and tell him.
“Isn’t that letter yours?” I’ll say. The letter from Perm, typed on a rickety typewriter.
I’m sitting directly opposite the gate to his courtyard, where it says: K. ŠAIN SMALL ANIMAL VETERINARY CLINIC.
And it seems to me that the ancient, lopsided house over the wall is watching me; the half-open senile windows squint at me. In my pocket I have the black stick with the half-peeled-off label. I could aim it at him; I could press it into his temple. Shove it into his mouth. Ask him for whatever he has of Daniel in return for the film.
It’s a black stick containing a copy of the amateur porno video, the one I had first seen at that private party in Zagreb. The copy is poor and murky. It had evidently been dark in the room, I reflected. It begins with the expression on the face of the man rearing up over a thin, white body. A young girl or, which seemed more likely, a very young boy, unknown to me. The fucker is holding the object of his lust by the shoulder or neck, a bit too firmly with one hand; with the other he is pressing it slowly downward, grabbing lower down, pushing in and thrusting slowly and powerfully and crying increasingly loudly until he climaxes, grunting and sobbing. That howling is what it’s impossible to forget. That crying was in fact why I had recognized his voice: a deep but nasal voice, as when a child is trying to imitate an adult man.
“Listen to the old pig squealing!” someone in the room had commented during the projection, laughing, and I shut the door, went out into the street, and walked for hours. I walked beside the Sava River, over the dyke and further on, until I collapsed with exhaustion and stayed lying in the mud and grass.
When we had sat in his garden several weeks earlier, the man from the film, whose blurred face I had been reconstructing all these years, the porno star Herr Professor Karlo Šain, had said to me, topping up my rose brandy in a glass of the finest crystal: “I haven’t sought or received much in life, dear Dada. And a little radiance would have been enough. You understand, just a fingerful of radiance, something gilded.”
