“A clearing? What do you mean by ‘a clearing’?”
“I don’t know. I suppose what I mean is the awful feeling that there’s no one behind you and no one in front of you.”
“But you’ve got Geert.”
“The Dutch are much better on foreign soil than on their own.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“They take swimmingly to living abroad, but they’re like fish out of water when they’re at home.”
“What do you expect to find when you’re ‘at home’?”
“One horror after another.”
“And what would you have here?”
“The absence of horrors.”
“For many that’s enough of a reason to stay.”
“Though Holland is tough, too, in its way,” she said calmly.
Then she took an envelope out of her bag and put it on my desk.
“What’s that?”
“The key to the flat.”
“Whose flat?”
“We don’t need it anymore, and you may be staying.”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“But it may turn out that you will.”
“Is it your flat?”
“No, Geert’s. Government subsidized. All you have to pay is the gas and electricity, and they come to almost nothing. Oh, I should tell you: it’s not in the center of things. The address and telephone number and everything else you need are in the envelope. The furniture’s pretty old, but you can chuck it. You can make all the changes you like. Geert and I are leaving in a week. Let me know when you decide. Go and have a look at it. Leave the key in the box if it doesn’t appeal to you.”
I was surprised at Ana and for a split second jealous of her. She seemed to have a certain knowledge I lacked. I stared at the envelope for a while after she left, then stuck it into my bag. Ana’s key had briefly opened the door that was holding back all my fears.
That left Igor, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. I kept thinking about Ana and Meliha and the lives they’d been leading, lives I’d known nothing — but nothing — about.
Igor’s paper lay in front of me, and I leafed through it absentmindedly though I’d read it before. As the basis for the paper on the theme of “return” in Croatian literature Igor had chosen a completely unexpected work, the fairy tale “How Potjeh Sought the Truth” by the classic children’s writer Ivana Brli
-Mažurani.
In a clearing in an old beech forest there lived old man Vjest and his three grandsons. One day the god Svaroži, whom Igor calls “the Slav Superman,” appears to the three brothers. And when he had spoken, Svaroži gave a wave of his cloak and lifted Ljutiša, Marun, and Potjeh onto its skirt. And he gave another wave of the cloak and it took to twisting. And the brothers on its skirt took to twisting with it, to twisting and turning and turning and twisting, and all of a sudden the world started passing before them. First they saw all the treasures and the fields and the estates and the riches that were then in the world. Then, twisting and turning and turning and twisting, they saw all the armies and the spears and the javelins and the generals and the spoils that were then in the world. And then, twisting and turning and turning and twisting even more, they suddenly saw all the stars, all the stars and the moon and the Seven Sisters and the wind and all the clouds. And these visions did greatly perplex the brothers, and still the cloak fluttered and rustled and swished like a skirt of gold. But then they found themselves back in the clearing, did Ljutiša, Marun, and Potjeh, with the golden lad Svaroži facing them as before. And thus did he speak: “This is what you shall do. You shall remain here in the clearing; nor shall you leave your grandfather until he has left you; you shall not go into the world for good or for ill until you have returned him his love.”
When Grandfather asks his grandchildren what they saw in the world and what advice they received from the god Svaroži, Potjeh cannot remember — Igor uses the English word blackout—so he leaves his home for the forest to seek his lost memory and Svaroži’s advice. There he is set upon by wood demons, whom Igor calls Lex Luthor’s adjutants….
I beckoned to Igor. He came in and sat down. I saw my own reflection in his face. It was like looking into a mirror. He seemed to have recorded every word I’d said during the second semester and had now switched on the tape. He began spitting back at me the dry, academic list of names and dates I’d crammed into the four of them, and he made precious little pretense at concealing his scorn for me. I interrupted him.
“I was a bit perplexed by your paper,” I said.
“It’s on a perplexing work.”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s the important truth Potjeh can’t seem to remember? Svaroži’s message? All Svaroži told him was to stay at home. As simple as ABC.”
“So?”
“So Svaroži appears to Potjeh one more time and tells him the same thing: go home. But what happens now that his memory has returned? He dies. ‘A quick wash and back I fly to my dear grandfather,’ he says, leans over a well, falls in, and drowns.”
“Well, what do you make of it?”
“Given the rules of the ‘there’s-no-place-like-home’ genre, they should all live happily ever after. Fairy-tale heroes find wisdom, riches, and princesses on their travels; they don’t fall into wells. Something must have got into Mažuranic to keep her from giving the fairy tale its conventional ending.”
“But Potjeh ends up in Svarožic’s court.”
“Mažuranic puts Potjeh in heaven, which is death plus a happy ending, but it’s a cop-out of an ending, because we’re all guaranteed heaven or hell in one way or another. So from a technical standpoint the work is pure crap; from a psychoanalytic standpoint, though, it’s pure genius.”
“Why?”
“The message is clear: ‘exile’ equals defeat — Potjeh wanders through the woods in a total fog; he has amnesia — and the return home equals the return of memory. But it equals death as welclass="underline" no sooner does Potjeh’s memory return than he falls into a well. So the only triumph of human freedom resides in the ironic split second of our departure in this, that, or some third direction. For the sake of that inner truth Mazuranic strayed from the genre and wrote a ‘bad’ fairy tale.”
He looked up at me, his dark, slightly crossed eyes weighing my soul.
He had defeated me: he had shown me something I would never have seen by myself. The work could support any number of interpretations, but Igor’s reading struck me as both valid and terrifying. What if everything he said was true? What if return is in fact death — symbolic or real — and exile defeat, and the moment of departure the only true moment of freedom we are granted? And if it is true, what do we do with it? And who are “we” anyway? Aren’t we all smashed to bits and forced to wander the earth picking up the pieces like Meliha, putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle, gluing them together with our saliva?
“What’s the matter, Comrade? I mean Professor Luci,” he said with a tinge of mockery, as if reading my mind.
That jerked me back into my role. The talk we’d just had was a step toward reconciliation. I’d held my hand out first, but now I pulled it back.
“Thank you, Igor. That will be enough. I’ll be handing in the grades today. Come back tomorrow or the next day and the secretary will tell you what you got.”