Projević: Like last time.
Mr. Ličina started reciting his sonnet in the manner of the actors at the recent performance for prisoners. Or so his recitation seemed to him. He raised his arms to the heavens (the ceiling), laid his hand over his heart, and took a bow when he finished. He all but curtsied.
Projević looked at Comrade Ćićko. Then he said:
“You’re free.”
And they released him.
Mr. Ličina signed the certificate of release and the confirmation that he had retrieved his personal effects: his suit, watch, fountain pen, hat, shirt, underwear, vest, tie, raincoat, handkerchief, riding breeches, socks, shoes (low-heeled, yellow, size 37), ring of keys.
The guard accompanied him to the prison gate.
Mr. Ličina walked toward the city on foot. It was raining and the wind tore the foliage from the poplars. Leaves whirled up and around, like leaflets tossed from a plane.
A bit before nine he reached his home. He called out his dog’s name: Lunja! Lunja!
The dog didn’t respond.
When Mr. Ličina opened the door to the apartment, the reek of stagnant air greeted him. He ran his finger through the dust on his desk. The top of it gaped bare; his typewriter had been confiscated.
Then, without taking off his coat, he started up the water heater in the bathroom. While the water was warming up, he started to dust in the other room.
He checked the water with his finger, and then he got undressed and stepped into the water that was warm, almost hot.
He took a long bath, huffing and puffing, and almost broke out in song. (But people would have heard him. Auntie Mara had seen him going into the building.) Then he rubbed himself dry using a clean towel that he took off a stack of ironed linens in the cabinet.
He held his shaving soap in his left hand, and with his right he spread the foam over his face, making very slow circles, reminiscent of a tango. Then he squirted a great deal of cologne into his palm and rubbed it in, first on his face and then on his chest, where an old man’s white hairs protruded. Lastly he puffed his cheeks up like a gargoyle and patted them with lotion-covered hands. His dry skin soaked up the moisturizer like the desiccated earth sucks in water.
Then he slowly put on his clothes, all of them clean and fresh. (Though everything smelled slightly of mothballs and uncirculated air.) Underwear, undershirt, shirt. Fresh pants (he took only the suspenders from the old pair), a fresh waistcoat and suit jacket. Clean socks, knee-high. He wiped the dust from his shoes with an old handkerchief.
Then he beheld his appearance once more in the mirror.
He tossed the damp towel from the clothesline into the bathroom, unhooked one end of the line and then jerked the other free of the wall together with its nail. He spread some newspaper (Politika) over a chair; it had been in his bathroom since before his arrest. Then he tied the cord to the hook from which the light fixture hung, and placed the noose around his neck. And he shoved the chair away with his foot.
THE DEBT
After a few “terrifying days,” things unexpectedly calmed down in the morning. The doctor knew that this calm was only illusory and provisional; he knew that inside this sick human organism certain changes were taking place, changes whose nature was entirely unknown to science and that depended on God as much as on the complicated mechanisms of the organs and psyche. The sick man lay on his back, buoyed lightly by pillows; a monitor tracked the steady beating of his heart. His body was hooked up by tubes to complicated instruments that, for one, flashed how his organs were functioning onto a screen; in addition they ensured that he was artificially fed, and they eased the work of his exhausted veins, bowels, and respiratory system. In the peace of the bright white room only the quiet hum of this machine was audible, along with the occasional tinkling of glass pipes when the sick man moved his limbs even a little. For a while the patient looked up at the bottle suspended above his head, the bottle from which dripped the fluid transmitting life-giving sustenance, by means of a clear tube, into his body.
His staring eyes had dimmed a bit, and he was cross-eyed too, in the manner of people who usually wear glasses but have taken them off.
All was still, to look at him from a remove.
Slowly the drops fell from the bottle; they welled up and then slid suddenly into the tube. And just as one drop was flowing down along the clear piece of tubing toward his body, the next drop had already begun to blossom. The sick man lay observing these drops. They served as a kind of rosary. The idea came to him, struck a part of his consciousness, that the hour of his death was drawing near. Behind him lay a life that was no better and no worse than other lives; he had loved, suffered, traveled, and written. Many people thought, and had said as much in articles, especially after his eightieth birthday, that his life had been filled with work and solitude. But no one knew the price of this work, in terms of renunciation, or how it was as forced as it was beneficial. He recalled, “as if through a foggy mist” (as a refined stylist he certainly never would have used this phrase), that he had been through some terrible crises in recent days, that he had resisted death with all his might, that he had avoided its clutches, that he had torn the tubes out of his veins and spit into death’s face, and that he had wept as he struggled with the phantom of death that was invisible but present; sometimes it stood by his bed and sometimes it was inside him, in his intestines, in his lungs, and in his feverish mind.
And then, on that morning — he knew neither when nor how — the calm descended. He accepted the unacceptable: for him it was all over. His days, his hours were numbered. He made an attempt to take stock of how he had lived, seeing his life from the others’ points of view, and it made him chuckle to himself. He was going to die, therefore, having filled up his life with solitude, self-abnegation, and labor; for all human endeavors teach but this one thing: that the meaning of human activity on earth resides in law, moderation, order, and renunciation. And everything great and beautiful that is made, is made with blood or sweat, and in silence. Who had said that? Had he read it somewhere or perhaps even written it himself? But the point was that, at this time, this thought seemed to him at the very least accurate, if not all too comforting.
He thought how nice it would be to have at his side one of those noble and sage individuals whom he had come to know over the course of his life: Alaupović, or Mr. Ivo Vojnović. In his lifetime he had met only two or three people as wise as they. The rest were like the majority of the human race: narrow-minded and selfish, with no sense of beauty, lacking sympathy for others, ignorant. They were people guided only by instinct and ambition — for love and food, for fame and fleeting glory. And whenever they entered his life, they created disorder, like an army occupying a city.
He looked at himself with others’ eyes and took stock of his life as the others, the strangers, saw it: he was leaving behind his collected works, in which his biography, his language, stood mingled with the history of his nation; this guaranteed him the thing people call immortality. Among his papers there were still a few texts that he kept, painstakingly sorted and selected, in bundles: poems, journals, notes. He had removed from these manuscripts everything that could have compromised him in the eyes of posterity, every trace of personal life, every private item, so that he would remain, in the eyes of future generations, even more of an abstraction, even more a writer, but less of a man of flesh of blood. There was, in this gesture of his, something both bitter and just: after all, he had spent all his days in the domain of fiction, in the world of Platonic ideals, and every side-trip he’d made into life turned into torment and misfortune, embarrassment and monotony. Every real-life decision outside the world of pure ideas, beyond the quiet and solitude, had brought him only injury; every action had missed the mark, every encounter with others had proved a setback, and every success was only a fresh misfortune. So he removed all names other than his own from those texts. He removed this entire ephemeral world that could only besmirch his name: because proving a fool to be a fool amounts to compromising oneself.