“You know, it was cancer,” the doctor said finally.
“No problem.” I replied again, and then I told him the whole story from the beginning about the seeds, the compost, the white styrofoam boxes and the sprouting plants. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, just nodding his head. I think he really was a tired man.
The lettuce, parsnips and carrots continued to grow. I often relaxed as I leaned out of the window. The grass between the concrete slabs was already getting dry. Autumn was on its way. The white boxes will remain empty. It’s not easy to get rid of unwanted things.
Awakening
By six o’clock the last trace of daylight had vanished from the room. Every fifteen seconds the glow of three cigarettes described the short, nervous trajectory through the darkness from their lips to the ashtray on the table. In the distance you could hear the muffled sound of nonstop warfare and the occasional burst of a machine gun or the revving of a car. The infrequent gusts of wind distorted the sounds like a mixing desk in a recording studio. It gave the impression of a virtual reality or multimedia event — listening to the digital transmission of a pop concert, say, or the spinning turntable of a cyber-DJ.
In the morning Davor left to fetch the water. Perhaps he dropped in on a friend in Bistrik, or took cover from the shelling in a café, or stayed to lunch at Aunt Rozalija’s. Or did he meet somebody else perhaps? Every hour brought fresh comfort and a new explanation. Yet in order to retain its happy ending the story’s plot had to become more and more complicated. As time went by, the mood of depression was punctuated by spells of euphoria unprovoked by anything except the need to perform the daily tasks, such as chopping wood or fixing the radio. But later a wave of indifference began to roll in, a private acceptance of everything, including the worst news. How would they react to the stranger who knocks on the door and, scratching himself or averting his gaze, reports that a shell had landed close to the water, just where Davor was standing, and a tiny, one could almost say unimportant, piece of shrapnel had hit him, against all the odds, where it shouldn’t have. Each puff of a cigarette was accompanied by this unspoken story which always ended in a sigh of resignation.
But nobody knocked on the door, and so apart from the rumbling background noise of the war — and that never went away — there was nothing to confirm or to deny the family’s hopes, or to underline the need finally to acknowledge the horror, with a deep breath, as a prelude to beginning again. At last a hand crushed its cigarette in the crystal ashtray and the ember dwindled into microscopic flames. The same hand reached for a match whose tiny flame briefly illuminated the faces of a man and two women as it proceeded to light the wick in a glass filled with oil and water.
The man got up with a sigh and limped off to fetch the car battery. He skillfully wired up a boom-box. Suddenly the end of a pop song was blaring out of the machine. They heard the tail-end of a melody and then the piercing beeps of the time signal marking the top of the hour. “It’s nine o’clock precisely,” said a voice. “Here is the news: leaving today on a state visit. . seventeen dead and eighty-five wounded. . under enemy fire. . in panic-stricken retreat. . the French Minister for Humanitarian Aid paid his respects to the victims. . our correspondent in the free territories reported new atrocities committed by the. . world sailing championships. . white-water canoeing. . our team received the warmest applause. . people were crying. . now the weather: the outlook for tonight is wind and rain.” The pop music started up again, a drum beating, a voice singing, “I know I’ll die of love and only love.” When the man disconnected the battery, the music continued for a second and then stopped abruptly.
Eight years ago Davor went camping with the scouts near Lake Boračko. It was part of an exam to become a Scout-Partisan. He and six other boys were not supposed to talk all day. They had to spend the night in the woods and cross the hanging bridge over the Neretva. The following day the other six returned but Davor was nowhere to be found. The whole camp began to search for him. They alerted the police in Konjic. The phone rang in the flat, and a man’s voice asked various questions about Davor. Did he show any signs of pathological fear? Was he afraid of the dark when he was little? How did he cope with loneliness? The father gave hysterical answers. The mother and sisters grew pale; it was chaos. That night Davor was found in the wood near Glavatičevo. He was laughing and pointing at something. When the scout leader gave him permission to speak, he calmly said that he had got lost because, unlike those six cheats, he had decided to become a real Scout-Partisan and cross the bridge. The next day the camp was over. The tents were folded, and only the regular geometrical patterns of dry grass and the scorched traces of the camp fires remained.
At midnight the older woman poured more oil into the glass and the flame crackled briefly. Once again the man fixed the wires to the battery. This time a woman’s voice reiterated the same news. The pounding became more syncopated. Regular waves of explosions covered the city from one end to the other. There was a sound like a cat scraping its claws on glass, very quiet at first but getting louder — it had started to rain.
The younger woman went over to the window and pressed her hand against the pane. “It looks like a real spring shower,” she said, “and yet by morning it will have turned to snow. It didn’t rain when it should have, so it has to now. There’s no winter without snow; you keep on hoping it won’t come this year, but it arrives with the first cherry blossom.”
She walked into the bathroom and picked up two aluminum bowls, then she went out into the rain. When she came back her hair was covered in droplets of water that shimmered like quicksilver in the candlelight. The water had a rather solid appearance, as though a gentle hand could have gathered up all the drops. Soon a different noise came from outside; it was the metallic sound of water pouring out of the drainpipes into the bowls.
The older woman held the now-forgotten bottle of oil between her knees. She looked down and saw that her dress was covered in grease marks.
She said, “You boarded up all the windows, there isn’t a glimmer of light in the room. Others light their candles at nine; we have to light ours at six. You’ll rot in this darkness.”
The man looked at her, clenching his right hand into a fist and raising it in front of his face as if he were about to scream. He jerked his hand open, drummed on the table with his fingers, then stood up and left the room. At first they just heard the sound of branches breaking and wet leaves fluttering, but soon it was possible to hear the man taking the boards off the windows and pulling down the sandbags, which landed with a dull thud on the ground. The sand went everywhere.
“Happy now?” cried the man.
The older woman sighed. The younger one nervously slapped her knees. The man came back into the room without a word, sat down on the bed and lit another cigarette. The two women also lit up at that moment. According to the house rule, they were only allowed two cigarettes each per day. They were already over the limit.
In the early days of the war Davor told his parents that he wanted to join the Territorial Army. His mother could never sleep while he was absent on duty. Her husband used to scold her, and so she always had a terrible migraine the following day. Usually Davor came back from military duty with a smile on his face, only to spend hours regaling the younger woman with stories of his exploits in the war zone. Of course he used to exaggerate slightly, making up jokes about himself as well as the Chetniks. Yet it seemed that in his bizarre, war-engendered happiness, he was unlikely to come to any harm. The man always hugged his “brave son” and interrupted with a story of his own — how in 1953, somewhere near Pirot, or somewhere even more remote perhaps, he was among half a dozen recruits who were ambushed by Bulgarian border guards.