My girlfriend came to believe that death only happened in Sarajevo. She became increasingly sentimental and almost distant. She asked me if I wanted to emigrate with her to New Zealand. I replied that I was happy in the cellar and that, in any case, New Zealand was a long way away, and I didn’t think I’d be happy Down Under. She never asked about the cactus. I didn’t like to mention it.
People change when they’re alone in the dark. It happens imperceptibly. I heard a story about a man who went to bed as usual one night and by the morning his hair had turned completely grey. Yet he didn’t remember having a nightmare or bad dream. At the time I lived in desperate fear of the cold.
One morning — it was day five — I woke to discover that all the water in the flat had frozen up. Only then did it occur to me that cacti have difficulty withstanding the cold. I took the plant downstairs and placed it in the cellar opposite the stove that we used to stoke with coal dust. Not too close, not too far away. In the precise spot that I reckoned would suit both a cactus and a human being. The next day it was drooping over the side of the pot. How was it drooping? Well, put it this way, the tip was pointing downwards as if the sun was under the ground. I watered the cactus for the last time but I realized that it was too late. The end was nigh!
The war has taught me how to calm my emotions and nerves artificially. Nowadays, in conversation, whenever somebody raises a topic that I find upsetting, I have a sense of this tiny red light automatically switching on inside me, not unlike the one you press to remove the background noise on a tape. And after that, I don’t feel anything. But when I think about that cactus, the light refuses to come on, and nothing else helps. It’s a minor consequence, like a bitter cyanide capsule. But — do you remember? — many years ago lots of people got upset because they found out horses died standing up. By contrast, I get sad just thinking about the way a cactus dies, like the boy in Goethe’s poem. It’s not important, mind you, except as a warning to avoid detail in life. That’s all.
Theft
In our garden there was an apple tree whose mouth-watering fruits could be seen from the upstairs window of the house next door. Our neighbors, Rade and Jela, used to go to the market to buy apples for their two young daughters — but it was no use. However delicious, other apples were never as tempting as the ones that were visible from the family’s window. Each morning, as soon as Rade and Jela left for work, the girls would jump over the garden fence in order to pick the overripe fruit. Usually I chased them away by throwing mud or stones at them. In other words, I defended my property, but as a matter of principle and not because I was particularly tempted by these or indeed by any other apples. Seeking revenge, the younger girl told my mother that I had got an “F” in math. As a result, my mother paid an unexpected visit to my school and was able to confirm the truth of my enemy’s allegation. She spent the next few days torturing me with quadratic equations. All those x’s and y’s made life intolerable, so I decided to get back at our next-door neighbors in any way I could. Here’s what I did: I found myself a hiding place and spent the whole day waiting for the thieves. Eventually they turned up, as I knew they would, and that’s when I jumped out of the bushes and grabbed my enemy by the hair and began to drag her toward our house. I planned to lock her in the pantry until my mother returned home from work in order to punish her. But the little girl resisted fiercely, screaming and struggling. In the end she escaped, leaving only a handful of hair and a tiny piece of scalp in my hand. I was furious and ran inside, locking the door behind me. A short while later, I heard Rade screaming under the window that he was going to kill me. He must have repeated the threat to my mother, because she responded in kind. Predictably, they spent three or four hours trading insults at the window. My mother called Rade a gangster from Kalinovik. He called her a shameless hussy.
Over the next twenty years or so, the two of them never even said hello to each other, though I have to say neither of the sisters ever came to steal again. Each year, August and September would come and go, and the apples were no less beautiful and tantalizing, but the two families continued to live side by side without exchanging so much as a glance. Our parents grew old without forgetting the insults. In time the two girls got married and moved away, but otherwise everything remained the same.
A few days after the war began the police searched Rade and Jela’s flat and found two hunting guns and an automatic rifle. The neighbors were understandably frightened. Indeed, they began to speculate about whom Rade was planning to kill, and how. For many years he had stopped coming out of his house. Was he hoping to lure his victim into a trap? Jela continued to go to the market in order to fetch the humanitarian aid and water until one day a shell exploded ten yards away from her, blowing her arm off. The tragedy had the unfortunate effect of driving Rade into the open, so to speak. For the first time in ages, the neighbors got to see Rade in the flesh, although he seemed to have aged preternaturally in the last few months and looked a hundred years old when he finally emerged from his house with a little saucepan of soup and three shrivelled lemons. He visited the hospital once a day, keeping his eyes fixed to the ground, apparently terrified by the prospect of catching somebody’s eye.
During that war-torn September our apple tree produced riper and tastier fruit than ever before. My mother joked that the last time such delicious apples had been seen was in the Garden of Eden. I climbed the tree, from whose uppermost branch I had a good view of the Chetnik positions on Trebevič. Hanging in the sky, I picked dozens of apples with the enthusiasm of Scrooge McDuck when he’s in his vault throwing money in the air. As I reached out for one particularly juicy apple that was growing only half a yard from Rade’s window, I couldn’t help spotting him in the back of the room. I froze on the branch but eventually Rade shrank back a few inches. I don’t know why but I didn’t want him to go.
“How are you, Uncle Rade?”
“Be careful, son, it’s high — don’t fall. .”
“How’s Auntie Jela?”
“Well, she’s hanging on, with her one hand, to what remains of life. The doctors say that she’ll be coming out of the hospital soon.”
We talked like this for two long minutes. I held on to the branch with one hand, and gripped my bag full of apples with the other. I was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of nausea that was infinitely worse than anything caused by exploding shells and by guns that have or have not been found in people’s houses. It was as though, hanging from the top of the apple tree in front of Rade’s window, everything I knew about myself and other people had become meaningless.
Rade continued, “You know, son, when you lose an arm you continue to feel it for a long time. It’s something psychological, as though you deceive yourself into thinking you still possess the missing limb. Every day I cook a little something to take to my wife, but there is no life in it. I look at the beans or the thin soup, and then I look at her and I say, ‘Jela!’ but she doesn’t respond. Then she says, ‘Rade!’ and I don’t respond. D’you understand, son? We’re alive just enough to see each other and to conclude that we’re not alive any more. That’s all. Sometimes I look at these apples and marvel at the life in them. They don’t care about all this. They don’t know. I daren’t even mention them. .”