PS:
A friend of mine, a press photographer, took pictures, with the permission of the captain, on board a Soviet cruiser that had anchored at Kotor. Afterward, from land, he photographed with a wide lens the ship and the landscape around the bay. When he developed the film, it was as black as night.
The awareness of eternity, the “oceanic feeling,” yielded, independent of any technique of brouillage, only blots, red, black, or green, insofar as the senses of hearing, smell, and sight were unavailable during the taking of the photographs.
My father viewed this same scene in 1939 (five years before he disappeared at Auschwitz) and in 1898 so did Mr. Sigmund Freud, who went on to have his famous dream about the three Fates.
B
(The worst rathole I visited?)
From outside:
The house is obscured on one side by the village administrative building, on the other by a wooden stable, and on the front side by a short beech tree. The house is made of dried mud, the room of darkened tiles that have shattered or slipped in places. The door is small, so that a grown person can enter only by bending at the waist. A window, half a square meter in size, looks out onto the tree, which stands at a distance of about ten meters from the shack. This window opens outward. On the other side, facing the “garden,” where the outhouse is located, along with a neglected tract of untilled land, overgrown with weeds, there is a round opening for light built directly into the wall. The pane on it is partially broken and the hole is plugged up with rags.
From inside:
The space is divided by a thin mudded walclass="underline" the bigger side measures 2 m x 2 m, the smaller one 2 m x 1 m. The first one is called a “bedroom,” the second one a “kitchen.” The walls have been whitewashed with an ochre-colored preparation made by dissolving clay in lukewarm water. The effects of dampness and sunshine are such that this coating blisters or develops cracks that look like scales or the faded canvases of Old Masters. The floor is also of pounded clay that lies several centimeters lower than the surface of the yard. On humid days the clay smells of urine. (A shed for animals once stood here.)
In the larger room there are two wooden bed frames and two chests of drawers that are pulled out twenty to thirty centimeters from the wall. A rag carpet is stretched diagonally across the floor from the entranceway to the kitchen. In a corner of the kitchen stands a stove made of sheet metal. Two or three pots hang on heavy nails, and a wooden trunk serves as a sleeping platform and a pantry. Next to the stove lies a pile of decaying wet spruce cones for heating. There’s thick smoke in the kitchen, so thick that the people who sit on the chest or on the short wooden stools can barely see. Their voices work their way through the smoke as through water.
“Here was the alarm clock. On this nail,” I say to the man who brought me here in a car from Budapest. “A drunken Russian sailor took it in 1945.”
“Someday there will be a plaque here,” the man noted ironically as we were leaving the house. “It will say: HERE LIVED THE YUGOSLAV WRITER DANILO KIŠ FROM 1942 TO 1945.”
“Fortunately, the house is slated to be torn down,” I say.
“That’s a shame,” said the man who had brought me here in a car from Budapest. “If I had a camera with me, I’d take some pictures of it.”
PS:
Texts A and B are connected to each other by mysterious bonds.
THE MARATHON RUNNER AND THE RACE OFFICIAL
Although it does not entirely make sense in terms of chronology, I am convinced that it was from the late Leonid Šejka, the painter who referred to himself also as a “classifier,” that I first heard this story. Whether he read Abram Tertz’s book in manuscript form or someone related the story to him verbally, I do not know. But at any rate I’m sure that it was he who first recounted it to me. (He followed the winded runners with his eyes as they jockeyed for position, in the grip of terrible corporeal and mental strain amid an imaginary landscape to which he gave form and color. With three fingers of his right hand pressed together for emphasis, he sought the correct word and the right expression as if testing with the tips of his fingers the smoothness of a pigment or the thickness of a coat of paint; meanwhile his hand remained immobile, strangely still, as if paralyzed: in it a cigarette burns slowly while its ash remains intact, vertical.)
Here’s the story:
The marathon runners are warming up for the race in their shorts and tank tops to which bibs with large numbers are affixed. Among them were some who were participating for the first time, but there were also seasoned champions there, as well as one tall bony man, fifty years old, who was a celebrated veteran of many races and a winner many times over in the past, the pride of his nation.
It’s early autumn or late spring. Above the main square, a banner inscribed with the word “Start” stretches from the baroque town hall to a building housing a restaurant. Ladies are coming out of morning Mass, leading by the hands little boys with carefully combed hair. Young women in long skirts and lace collars are chatting gaily, their white gloves still in place.
When the race official lowers his flag, the runners take off with feigned unconcern. They have twenty-five kilometers in front of them, and even the neophytes know that they aren’t supposed to put their bodies and minds into high gear until much later.
And thus off they go, all bunched together, through the streets of the city that are in some places exposed to the sun (at which they pull their visors down over their eyes) and in other places through great polygons of shade, where tall buildings block the light. Office denizens take up positions on the sidewalks and applaud irresolutely; gentlemen brandish their canes, pointing out their favorites; the hairdressers abandon their lathered-up customers for a few minutes; and the apprentices, leaning on their doorposts, follow with a look of nostalgia in their eyes those lucky ones to whom fate has granted a freedom as good as wings, and to one of whom will belong the glorious status of victor.
They are still running in a pack, and through the thinning applause they can hear only the rhythmic scraping of their shoes and their own breathing. Then the city gradually falls behind them. They pass the smoke-filled slums, the paper mill, and the brewery; the train depot was on their left; now they have crossed the bridge; this is where the fields begin, and the meadows and the thickets of reeds from which the morning sun causes mist and the smell of grass to rise. This smell compels them to press their eyes shut as if the divine power of nature, the Antaeus-like juices of the earth, might thereby flow more easily into lungs and blood through their straining breath.
The route is marked off with flags, and the motorcycle, sputtering and meandering in front of them, prevents the runners from losing their way. Meanwhile, the compact mass of runners has broken up. Of course at first this is still just a test of their strength or whatever early (and temporary) crises they might experience before the bodies subordinate themselves to the power of will and reason and ambition; or until they give out completely.
Valdemar D., wearing #25, a tall fellow about thirty years of age, with close-cropped blond hair and long, lean legs, felt how he had finally shaken off his body’s lassitude, and by the time he reached the edge of the woods, he felt he had likewise overcome the sluggishness in his muscles, the indifference of his bones, the laziness of the soles of his feet — and at last overpowered this animal of a body that a saint had once named his donkey. He ran easily and his legs felt fresh, moving like well-oiled pistons. As if the forest smells and the redolent conifers had given him new strength. The sound of chainsaws, the hammering of axe-blows on sonorous tree trunks, the aroma of moist sawdust, reminiscent of urine — these were all distant echoes of his childhood.