To Gospava Dunđerović, who knew how to tell stories from the Ottoman times in the way the bards with their guslas once did—drawn out, lovely, precise: two crowns.
To Luj Bakotić, who made it possible for me not to squander my time in Rome on office work and for me not to be weighed down by obligations, so that instead I was able to learn, observe, and write: two crowns.
(“At the end, at the real final end, everything is good and everything is resolved harmoniously.” That’s Ivo Andrić. From Days of the Consuls.)
To Vladislav Budisavljević, whose understanding made it possible for me to devote myself to writing and to the study of history: in my work, these two things are mingled and interlaced, so that one can’t tell where the one begins and the other ceases: two crowns.
To Mrs. Vera Stojić, who took care of my manuscripts and correspondence, doing so out of love and respect: two crowns.
To Midhad Šamić, who discovered my sources and interpreted them in terms of erudition and creative impotence: one crown.
To that professor who gave me a copy of his book of aphorisms for my birthday: a crown (although actually he should give me a crown for having read it). As the old adage goes, a loan oft loses both itself and friend.
To Nurse Olga, who takes care of me, and who puts fresh flowers in my vase every morning and turns me over in my bed with a light but careful touch.
And on he went counting like that, to himself, in the quiet of the room filled with artificial light like the evening sun. At first his thoughts followed a chronology, but with the mounting pain (there wasn’t anything specific that ached; rather, everything caused him pain, and life itself hurt) the order became jumbled, the events grew confused, and time lost its way; only now and again did a coherent thought surface, as when the sun plays hide and seek behind the clouds.
He attempted, using his rosary of insulin drops, a rosary like those made of pearls, to tot up all the many sums he had enumerated so that he could establish the total amount he owed. He would begin and then stop again, then start counting once more with a vague dread, a dread akin to a shudder, that his woeful stipend — of two hundred crowns — would not be enough. He would have to leave somebody out for now; leave them empty-handed; he would have to remain indebted to someone. But whom should he cross off the list, especially when this list comprised only a part of his debts? He tried to reduce the total, to distribute it differently, but at any rate it wasn’t a sum of money that was at issue. Rather it was a sign of consideration, the result of his wish not to remain indebted to anyone in this world, at least insofar as one can settle accounts uniformly with one’s relatives, creditors, benefactors, and nuisances.
The nurse was sitting in the adjacent room, and through the open door she kept an eye on the monitor where the functions of the patient’s heart were being charted in jagged but evenly spaced waves. In her starched white smock, and with a white ribbon in her hair, she sat sideways at a table, reading a romance novel in Bazaar magazine: she was riding along on the wide blacktop; next to her sat Nick Chester with his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his powerful, hairy chest. “Nick had laid his right hand on her taut thigh; the car glided noiselessly along the broad asphalt road in the direction of Colorado. But suddenly, when he turned his head toward her to say those words she had waited so long to hear. ” The nurse braced herself by pressing her orthopedic sandals against the wall with all her might, as if to prevent the catastrophe that was taking shape in the next line of the text, in the form of a huge eighteen-wheeler; the truck appeared out of a curve and its headlights blinded Nick Chester, who never even got around to uttering the words that his young heart was dictating to him. Glancing up from the pages of Bazaar, where love was being extinguished before her eyes, the nurse directed her sleepy, mournful gaze at the monitor: the waves were growing ever more jagged and a glowing dot, accompanied by a light beep, was skipping across the white horizontal line. It was like the screen of a ping-pong video game (which she had seen two years before in a hotel down in Budva).
Then her eyes fell upon the sick man, and it seemed to her that he was moving his lips. Knowing that this was an important patient, she abandoned her spot on the seat of the Cadillac for a moment, there to the right of Nick Chester, and went over to the bed.
The patient looked her straight in the eyes.
“Do you need anything?”
“Lend me two crowns.”
His words were quiet, labored, but perfectly intelligible.
“Excuse me,” the nurse said, leaning over closer to him. “I didn’t quite get that.”
“I am two crowns shy of being able to settle my debts. I won’t stay indebted to you either, Nurse. I don’t want to remain indebted to anyone. I’ll pay it all back to you, too, right down to the last kreuzer.”
“Of course. I know you’re good for it. I’ll bring you the money right away.”
At that point she went over to the adjoining room.
“Doctor, the patient in No. 5 is asking me to lend him two crowns.”
“Give them to him, Nurse.”
“But two crowns, sir?”
“His mind is wandering, Nurse. Give him two dinars. If his condition worsens, call me. As long as he’s quiet, I don’t want to go in. That might upset him. Go. Do you have the two dinars?”
“Yes,” said the nurse, taking her change purse out of the pocket of her apron.
“Here you go,” the nurse said as she laid the coins on the night-stand next to the patient’s bed; they vibrated on the marble top and then the noise abruptly stopped.
“Doctor! Doctor!” the nurse called out. “He’s stopped breathing. Look at the monitor. His heart’s stopped beating.”
“Summon the director quickly,” said the doctor. “You, Nurse, you paid the fare for his ride on Charon’s ferry.”
A AND B
A
(The magical place)
From Kotor (Kotor is located in the Zeta region of Yugoslavia, on the Gulf of Cattaro, a bay off the Adriatic) you must set out at around five in the morning. After an hour of driving up the steep serpentine curves, you have to stop somewhere and wait.
The day must be clear, but there have to be a few white clouds in the west that are reminiscent of a herd of white elephants.
Then you have to let your eyes take in the sea, the mountains, the sky.
And then the sky, the mountains, the sea.
And you have to know for certain that your father traveled this same stretch of road, either on a bus or in a taxi he had hired in Kotor, and you have to be convinced that he beheld this same sight: the sun popping into view in the west from behind clouds that looked like a herd of white elephants; the high mountains dissolving in mist; the inky dark blue of the water in the bay; the city at the foot of the mountains; the white ship putting in at the jetty; the soap factory where thick smoke gushed into the air from chimneys and enormous windows glowed with fiery light.
You also have to take note of those chirping crickets (as if a million wristwatches were being wound up), for they are otherwise so easily forgotten, the same way it’s possible not to notice, because of its omnipresence, the smell of sagebrush at the side of the road.
Then the thing is to forget everything else, and to observe from this godlike vantage point the meeting of the elements: air, earth, water.
If all of these conditions are met, you will acquire an experience of eternity that Koestler called “oceanic feeling.”