I stood by the grave and observed. Hugging the stone and seemingly contorted, ants stretched out their wispy antennae in the direction of the huge swollen body, not daring to attack it. And the dead rat, the living rat from the novel, lay there motionless, still unmarked by any visible signs of decay, like a heavy armored vehicle; its treads had been blown apart by an anti-tank mine and its crew had abandoned it.
“I sink into the deep mire, where there is no bottom; I fall beneath the water into the depths and the spate will cover me. May my prayer rise up before you; incline your ear to my wailing; for my soul is full of woe, and my life approaches the inferno. You have placed me in the bottom of the deepest pit, into the darkness and the abyss.”
Using ropes, the gravediggers lowered the casket into the hole that had been dug next to the drive. The letters on Noémie’s headstone were already starting to dull; the marble plaque resembled an iceberg that had survived the winter; on the bare wires of the wreaths scraps of crepe paper hung, washed colorless by the rain.
As we moved past the opening, we threw handfuls of earth onto the coffin, the same way one used to throw stones onto dead bodies in the desert so their skeletons wouldn’t be scattered by wild animals. One of the gravediggers was carrying a little wooden chest with earth from Jerusalem; the earth was light in color and loose and was mixed with desert sand. The wreaths were all leaning on Noémie’s grave. One of them read “For Jurij Golec — may God forgive you.” I understood, even though the name of the benefactor wasn’t listed: “I only like living people; I don’t like dead people.” I knew who was capable of leaving so harsh a message, which was also a sign of love.
I waited around until the undertakers had put the marble slab in place. It was identical to the one on Noémie’s grave. Then I helped them arrange the wreaths, and divide them fairly. After so many years the two of them were resting under the same roof again, like a pair of lovers from the old days; not in the same grave, but still next to each other. After thirty-three years of shared life.
“An excellent bottom line for an old Jewish couple,” I said to myself.
Postscript
The name Jurij Golec is not invented; it’s merely one of the names that my unfortunate friend Piotr Rawicz assigned the narrator in his one novel, Blood from the Sky. Thus his presence in this story has remained halfway between reality and the world of Platonic concepts.
The price of the fur coat seemed exaggerated to me at first, and I was prepared to lower it arbitrarily by knocking off a zero. Fortunately, just as I was finishing this story, I found an ad in a newspaper (from November 19, 1982) for a large store specializing in furs; a Russian sable at that time cost 106,000 francs after the 15 % discount (original price: 125,000). Thus I learned, six months after taking a look into the closet of the woman known here as Noémie, that her most expensive fur coat was a zibeline (Russian sable), that it was worth precisely the amount given in the story, and that J.G. had not exaggerated. Aside from these utilitarian facts, e.g., the price of a fur, I discovered an entire array of exotic fauna and subsequently went over Noémie’s wardrobe in my mind, that wardrobe where so many furs of inscrutable origins shimmered: mink, silver fox, arctic fox, lynx, Canadian wolf, astrakhan, beaver, nutria, marmot, muskrat, coyote; and these have now, voilà, found their way into the story through the back door, after the fact, unleashing new sensations, opening new worlds: métiers, market forces, money, adventure, hunting, weapons, knives, traps, blood, animal anatomy, zoology, far-off exotic regions, nocturnal animal noises, Lafontaine’s fables; great are the temptations of a tale. In contrast to a novel, however, one may not, in a tale, open the doors of cabinets with impunity.
THE LUTE AND THE SCARS
Although I had sworn never to set foot in the place again, one evening, after a two-year absence from Belgrade, I dropped by the Writers’ Club. I’d had plenty of opportunities to convince myself that associating with authors was difficult, fraught with misunderstandings, jealousy, and insults. And I was also aware of the fact that this kind of intellectual struggle, éscrime littéraire, bitter and sterile, is part and parcel of the literary trade, just like writing reviews and checking page proofs. On this point I remembered a piece of advice that Chekhov once gave a young writer, challenging him to leave the provinces and mingle with the literary crowd in the big city; once he’d gotten to know them, he would draw less idealistic conclusions about writers.
It was early autumn and warm out, and people were still seated in the garden. An undertone of voices was audible, along with clinking silverware and tittering women. Upon entering I took a look at the guests and discovered with astonishment that in the two years of my absence nothing had changed; they were all sitting in their old places and appeared to be drinking the same bottles of wine that they had ordered on the last evening I was here. It was just that the women were a touch more voluptuous, and the men, graying at the temples, had let their bellies go. The rings under everyone’s eyes were even darker, and their voices had become more gravelly still from drink and tobacco. With my back turned to the garden there was now only one table in my field of vision, the one under the gnarled tree, closest to the entrance. Two middle-aged men I did not know were sitting at the table, along with a round-faced woman with bleached-blonde hair and small, lively eyes. The woman kept giving me a little smile.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
I shook my head.
“Anjutka,” she said. “We met once at Nikola’s house.”
Now I remembered.
“Don’t burn your bridges behind you,” I repeated under my breath. “How are you?”
“I got married,” she said. “This is my husband.”
She looked like a shaggy old dog. She was constantly brushing the hair out of her eyes; she tossed her head back coquettishly, causing the flabby skin on her cheeks to shake. She was one of those women who don’t understand how to grow old, who add to the misfortune of aging a grotesque mask of youthfulness. It was easy for me to calculate how old she was. Back when I slept with her, she had been thirty-nine; I had been twenty-three then; and since that time about fifteen years had passed. “I could have been your mother,” she told me. “Almost.” In those days I lived in the vicinity of the Dunav railway station. She demanded that I retain the formal mode of address. “This doesn’t give you the right to speak casually to me,” she said; then she would go back to rolling her eyes and imitating the throes of passion. In the morning I walked her to the streetcar stop and told her we wouldn’t be seeing each other again. She answered me with a proverb: “Don’t burn your bridges behind you.” She was right. A week later I looked her up again. “I’ve been thinking of you, Anjutka.” In the morning I awoke on her maternal bosom.
In those days she worked as a guide for Russian tourists and traded on the black market. She succeeded in selling me Bulgarian rose water (tiny ampoules in a wooden container that resembled a salt cellar), a portrait of Pushkin in bronze bas-relief on a pedestal of Caspian marble, and Blok’s selected works in three volumes (Moscow, 1958). I knew that these were gifts she had received from Russian tourists.
She leaned across the table toward the other men and related something to them in a low voice while shaking her head. I observed the fatal workings of time on her face.