As he leafed through the papers, Arnoš was struck by the news that Czech vets had found an unidentified strain of bird ’flu on two farms near the town of Norin. The vets had confirmed that it was the H5 virus, but they were not sure whether it was the H5N1 type, which, if measures were not taken in time, would be as deadly to humans as the Spanish ’flu of 1914. The article suggested that, in the course of the last year, the virus had appeared in some thirty countries. Josef Duben, spokesman for the Czech Veterinary Service, announced that, as far as the Czech Republic was concerned, it had not yet been decided whether or not to decontaminate the two farms where the H5 virus had been detected. For the time being there was a three-kilometre quarantine.
The item caught Arnoš’s attention because of Norin, where his first wife, Jarmila, lived. He hadn’t called her for more than a year now. This would be a good excuse for a little chat, he thought, puffing the smoke from his cigar with relish.
What about us? We carry on. While the meaning of life may slip from our hold, the purpose of a tale is to be told!
2.
Beba was sitting in the bath weeping bitterly. No, she had not burst into tears as soon as she entered the suite, because it took her some time to produce the quantity of tears she was going to shed. When she first came in, she swept her eyes slowly over every detail, exactly like a diver examining the seabed. She ran her hand over the snow-white linen in the bedroom, opened the cupboards, went into the bathroom, removed the disinfectant tape from the toilet, examined the little toiletries by the washbasin, stroked the soft white towelling wrap. Then she opened the curtains and before her eyes stretched a magnificent view of the spa and the wooded hills around it. Here Beba suddenly remembered a Bosnian she had asked to redecorate her flat. It was long ago. Beba had asked for it all to be painted white. When he finished the job, the Bosnian had said: ‘Here you are, my dear, now your flat is like a swan!’
And now everything congealed in that stupid word swan. The word stuck like a bone in her throat – and Beba burst into tears. And what exactly was the matter? In that hotel with its white façade, spreading its wings over the town like a swan, in the soft space of the imperial suite, wrapped round her like an expensive fur coat, Beba was forcefully struck by a sudden awareness of how ugly her life was. As though under powerful police searchlights, all at once the image of her Zagreb flat appeared before her eyes. The miniature kitchen where she had pottered and fiddled about for years, the fridge with the broken handle and its plastic interior now grey with age, the rickety chairs, the sofa and worn armchairs that she covered with rugs and cushions to make them look ‘jollier’, the moth-eaten carpet, the television set in front of which she sat mindlessly more and more often and for ever longer periods. And then the licking and cleaning of all that junk and trembling at the thought that something might stop working – the television, the fridge, the vacuum cleaner – because she could no longer buy anything much. Her pension was barely enough to cover her basic outgoings and food, while her meagre savings had vanished with the Ljubljana Bank some fifteen years before, when the country fell apart and suddenly her bank was in a different state, and everyone had been rushing headlong to steal from everyone else. Had she wanted, she could have derived some bitter satisfaction from it alclass="underline" in comparison with many other people’s losses hers were negligible, because she had simply had nothing in the first place.
Then all at once, everything had turned ugly. The people around her had grown ugly with hatred, and then with self-pity and the realisation that they had been cheated. They had all developed a rat-like expression, even the young, those who had begun to come of age breathing in their parents’ poisonous breath.
Beba was weeping because she could not remember when she had last had a holiday. She used to go in both summer and winter. Winter holidays on the coast had been especially cheap. Now they were out of the question, now everything was out of the question. The coast had apparently been bought up by wealthy foreigners and local tycoons.
When Beba opened her suitcase to put her things into the wardrobe, and when the salami wrapped in foil that she had brought along ‘just in case’ rolled out, it unleashed a new torrent of tears. That salami made her look like a comic figure from some other age who had accidentally found herself in this one. A glance at her cosmetic bits and pieces, her toothbrush and toothpaste (especially her worn, frayed toothbrush!), by contrast with those that awaited her in the hotel bathroom, provoked a sharp pain under her diaphragm. And, as though she were performing some kind of ritual murder, Beba threw all her bits and pieces – one by one – into the bathroom rubbish bin. Bang! Bang! Including the salami in its foil. Bang!
Although she had brought with her all the best things she possessed, Beba’s clothes now seemed shoddy and vulgar. She was used to poverty, she bore it cheerfully, as though it were an unavoidable downpour. Besides, hardly anyone lived better. She was the daughter of working people from the suburbs of Zagreb who, instead of training as a hairdresser or retailer, had insisted on going to art school. And she graduated, but, for various reasons, was obliged to get a job. She worked for years at the Zagreb medical faculty, drawing anatomical sketches for professors, students and medical textbooks. In those days there were no computers, but everything changed when they came on the scene. Beba continued to carry out administrative tasks, and then she retired. It was through the faculty that she had come by her little apartment, some forty square metres in size.
Beba sat in the bath wrapped in lacey foam. She could not remember the last time anyone had treated her with greater warmth or tenderness than this hotel bath. This was the kind of painful realisation that drives the more sensitive to put a bullet in their temple, or at least to look around to see where they might attach an adequately strong noose. Now her decision to come on holiday with Pupa and Kukla seemed a mistake. It would have been better if she had stayed in her burrow. All the more so since she could not see the point of their coming here. Who goes on holiday with an eighty-eight-year-old lady with one foot in the grave?! Pupa had stubbornly insisted that they should go ‘as far away as possible’. They could have gone to a spa in Slovenia, but that wasn’t far enough for Pupa. They could have gone to Austria or Italy, but at a certain moment Pupa had latched onto this place. It was true that the journey had gone without a hitch; Beba even had the enduring impression that an invisible hand was carrying out all the actions for them, guiding them towards their destination. She did not understand how Pupa had come by so much money. Pupa was a doctor, a gynaecologist, who had retired long ago, and pensions had not increased – on the contrary, they were lower with every passing year. Beba had several times stopped herself from calling Zorana, Pupa’s daughter, to tell her about the situation, but she held back, because she had given Pupa her word that she would say nothing. Pupa had asked them not to tell anyone where they were going, which was a little strange, but could be explained by Pupa’s old lady’s paranoia. And then, even if she had wanted to, Beba had no one to whom she could boast, or complain, and that was the most sorrowful thing of all.
Beba gave a start when a telephone rang right by her ear. And when she realised that the handset on the wall was not an additional shower-head but a telephone (Heavens! A telephone in the bathroom!), Beba burst into tears again.