By the way, though — you, where do you stand?
1Igor Smirnov, “Roman i smena epoh: Zavist Jurija Oleshi,” Zvezda, 8 (2012).
2Ibid.
2. MY OWN LITTLE MISSION
It’s clear that everything is on its way to wrack and ruin, everything has been predetermined, there’s no escape — you’re going to perish, fat-nose! Every minute the humiliations are going to multiply, every day your enemy is going to flourish like a pampered youth. We’re going to perish. That’s clear. So dress up your demise, dress it up in fireworks. . Say farewell in such a way that your “goodbye” comes crashing down through the ages.
CIRCUS
EVERY DAY THE world we’re living in is increasingly turning into. . a circus. Yes, I know, the comparison’s a dull one. It’s what people used to say in ancient B.G. (Before Google). It’s a complete circus! My life has turned into a circus! Politics is a circus! The word circus was an analogy for chaos, madness, unbecoming behavior, for events that had gotten out of hand, for life’s more grotesque turns. It’s possible, though, that the word might soon regain currency. Let’s remember P. T. Barnum for a second, father of the circus and American millionaire, and his declaration that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Barnum’s cynical declaration naturally doesn’t only apply to Americans. The circus is global entertainment.
My next-door neighbor is in the habit of not taking his trash directly out to the big garbage bins on the street, preferring to leave them outside his front door for weeks. He dumps his wastepaper in a cardboard box, and when the wind blows it goes flying everywhere. I can’t work out why he finds it so hard to part with his trash, but I’m afraid to ask.
I spoke to the building superintendent.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you. You know, lately people have become very sensitive,” he said.
Sensitivity — there we go, another old-fashioned word. Really, every day people are more and more sensitive. Recently, a hypersensitive passerby elbowed me aside just because I was daydreaming and heading down the left and not the right side of the stairwell. Sensitivities vary, have various causes, and take various forms.
Some poor Dutchman bought a TV, but it turned out that it didn’t work properly so he spent a year trying to sort things out. In the end, when his sensitivity hit overload, he packed a revolver and went back to the store where he bought the TV, with the obvious intent of shooting the boss. At the last minute he changed his mind and put a bullet in his own temple instead. Today even his children won’t visit his grave, which is perhaps understandable. How do you honor the memory of a father who killed himself because of a television?
More recently, a twenty-six-year-old Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, got all sensitive, lost his nerve, and set fire to himself on a main square somewhere in the Tunisian provinces. Since then heaps of stuff has happened, and a few more sensitive people have set themselves on fire. There was an Egyptian, then an Algerian. . all in all, people have been catching fire like matchsticks.
In little Croatia, where out of sensitivity people punch each other’s face in every now and then, a construction worker turned up on site and put a few rounds into his boss. Apparently he hadn’t been paid in months. The media didn’t show the slightest sensitivity toward his case.
And Đurđa Grozaj, she got all sensitive too. For thirty-five years the fifty-four-year-old single mother was employed in a Croatian clothing factory. Today the factory is in receivership and Đurđa is unemployed. Đurđa has joined the ranks of the aforementioned almost four hundred thousand unemployed. Together with her colleagues, as a sign of protest Đurđa went on a hunger strike. The public played the statue of the three monkeys. OK, well, not quite everyone. Đurđa and her colleagues were honored with the symbolic “Pride of Croatia” award and invited for coffee with the Croatian President. As she explained, that didn’t mean much, because not having any money she’d already given up coffee. In December 2010, the bank decided to seize all Đurda’s movable assets because of a debt of about seven hundred dollars. Đurđa had been a guarantor for a friend, who then didn’t repay the loan, and so Đurđa made the repayments for as long as she could. The bank’s writ was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Đurđa Grozaj decided to throw herself in front of a tram. The tram driver braked at the last minute. As she told reporters: “Even the tram didn’t want to run me over.”
Sensitivity, for better or for worse, isn’t solely a human trait. Animals also display well-developed signs of sensitivity. At the same time the unfortunate Mohammed Bouazizi successfully self-immolated and Đurđa Groznaj unsuccessfully threw herself under a tram, dead birds fell from the sky all over the globe; in the city of Beebe, Arkansas, the Swedish town of Falköping, and in the Italian town of Faenza. On the English coast not far from Kent a heap of crabs washed up on the beach. Nobody’s quite sure why. There’s a kind of monkey (Macaca fascicularis), whose form of social organization is very similar to that of humans, which apparently has suicidal tendencies. Then there are claims that dogs often suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder and have self-harm tendencies, like birds in cages that nervously pluck out their own feathers. The life of the sap-sucking insect known as the Pea aphid, parasitic on various forage crops, is also very sensitive. When attacked by ladybugs they’re self-programmed to explode. Little suicide bombers.