Parallel spaces in my dreams inevitably portended monstrous grimaces, malicious warnings. The dreams came like sudden gusts of wind. They were followed by periods of calm, then started up again with renewed force. But eventually they petered out and ceased altogether.
In time they wound together into a single skein, and I put them aside. All but one, that is, which I made it my business to remember. The house in that dream was something of a labyrinth. It had several levels and was made of a number of incongruous materials. The roof was so high it seemed more suitable to a church. Suddenly I noticed that the roof was swelling into the shape of something like a funnel, and before I knew it the roof burst and what should come down through the “funnel” but a stream of books. It began the size of a trickle of grain but ended up an avalanche, pages hurtling through an air thick with book dust. Goran wasn’t there, but I could see Mother on the other side of the room staring up at the ceiling in amazement. I ran over to her and grabbed her by the hand, and the two of us ran out into the street just before it collapsed like a house of cards.
“The key!” Mother screamed. “Have you got the key?”
“No, I haven’t,” I said with a pang of guilt, yet perfectly aware of how ridiculous her concern was: what good is a key without a house?
“Well, now we haven’t even got a key,” she said in despair.
Geert and Ana’s flat consisted of a living room, a bedroom, a tiny kitchen with a balcony, a narrow hallway, and a tiny bathroom. There was a television set and a pile of videos on a low table in the living room and a half-dead rubber plant next to the television set. There was a bookshelf with a few books against one wall and an old couch with a grimy, faded slipcover against the other. The wall above the couch was decorated with an upbeat but beaten-up Dušan Petriši
poster, a map of Belgrade in its Yugoslav heyday. On the table with the videos I found Ana’s list of instructions: the numbers of the phone and gas companies, the location of the stopcock, and so on. The carpeting in the living room was mud-stained and threadbare, the wallpaper in tatters, the windows curtainless and cloudy. The blinds were covered with a thick layer of dust.
Without giving the matter much thought, I went out and bought a variety of detergents and all sorts of scrub brushes and sponges. I began with the bedroom. Everything that could be turned upside down I turned upside down. I washed the windows and door. I swabbed the wardrobe with alcohol to get rid of the stale odor. I gave the blinds an alcohol rub as well. I vacuumed everything, walls included. Then I hung my clothes in the wardrobe and made the beds with the freshly washed linen I’d brought with me. The bedroom was now tolerable. One room down.
Next I gathered up the rubbish. I threw out a pile of newspapers, all the leftover food, and some cracked dishes. I tore down the poster from the living room wall and emptied the bathroom of everything that wasn’t cemented in place. I put it all into black plastic bags, which I put out by the front door. I would haul them downstairs in the morning. I then gave the bathroom a thorough going-over. I filled the medicine chest with my own cosmetics and adorned the sink with a porcelain soap-dish I’d picked up somewhere. Once the bathroom felt more or less presentable, I took a shower, fell dead-tired into bed, and slept the night through.
The next day I launched into the kitchen. I spent a great deal of time and energy removing stains from the cabinets, fridge, stove, tiles, windows, and door. Despite my aching wrists I proceeded to the living room. I vacuumed the walls, carpet, and couch and did my best to beat the unpleasant smell out of the latter two, after which I attacked them with a wire brush and cleaning fluid. Because the wallpaper was hopelessly filthy, I went out and bought some paintbrushes, a can of paint, and a ladder. I spent the next two days covering the wallpaper, which was luckily the kind that can be painted over, with a thin layer of white paint. The place was beginning to look better now, but the freshly painted walls only pointed up the grayish cast of the woodwork. So I sanded it all down and sealed it with a white oil-based paint. That took another two or three days.
Then I started shopping in earnest. I found a nice grayish-white bedspread, and once I’d draped it over the couch, put a lamp I’d purchased earlier on the table, filled a vase with fresh flowers, and hung a solidly framed poster of the Louis Hine black-and-white photo of workers perched high up on a beam during the construction of the Empire State Building and smoking away, the living room became livable. True, it was still very much a “student pad,” but that didn’t bother me in the least.
I stocked the kitchen cupboards with the basics and bought a new teapot and an elegant china teacup. Nor did I neglect the rubber plant. I took it out onto the balcony, replanted it in a bigger pot, mixing in enriched soil, pruned the dead branches, wiped the dust off the leaves, and brought it back into the living room. I looked through the collection of videos Geert and Ana had left behind, dusted them off and arranged them neatly in the bookshelf. I wiped the covers of their books with alcohol and put them back on the shelves next to the ones I had brought.
On a tour through the flat looking for other things in need of repair, I noticed that the wallpaper just above the door leading to the living room had buckled a bit. I took the ladder out of the closet where the gas and electricity meters were, and climbed up to finger the place in question. It burst like a balloon, scattering bits of plaster over the floor and revealing a concrete wall covered with postcards and magazine illustrations, now completely yellow. I broke off a piece to get a better look at it, and off came several layers of paint, which fell to the floor with a thwack. I stood facing a “frieze” of pornographic images, an amateur collage of homosexual fantasies, most likely the work of the tenant who had lived there before Geert and Ana. They showed dark-skinned boys with laurel wreaths on their heads either urinating, kissing, or embracing against a stylized Greco-Roman backdrop. The paper, which had turned the color of stale urine as it became one with the wall, made me retch.
I climbed down and sat on the couch, unable to move, listening to the silence. Suddenly I heard a popping sound and looked up, holding my breath, to see the wallpaper cracking open along the walls, making a series of wavy, eventually joining paths. I watched them crack, peel, reel, twist like springs until off they snapped, and dropped with a crisp, dry thud. I was surrounded by a wall of dust raised by an invisible wind. I threw a glance at the front door, but, no, the key was in the lock. In the meantime, the silence had returned. I looked down at my hands. They were red and swollen. The detergents had taken their tolclass="underline" my hands were one big wound, the skin peeling off in tiny flakes to reveal the three bloody stripes.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t looked out the window even once during the past few days. I didn’t know what the weather was like or what time it was. I had completely lost my bearings. I just sat there holding an invisible low-life visa and peeling inside.
I realized I had to pick myself up and do something, anything. I had to combat the despair that had momentarily taken me over. I stood, pulled down the first video that came to hand, and popped it into the VCR. Then I went back to the couch, gave the spread enough of a shake to send the scraps of wallpaper that had alighted on it to the floor, and lay down.
At some point during the night I was awakened by the buzz of the television set. The snow on the screen seemed to have slipped into the room. I opened the window and let in the July air. The concrete square was shining in the moonlight and the neon BASIS sign on the building across the square. To the right I could just make out a corner of the modest local mosque’s turquoise dome. The square had some squat, small-crowned chestnut trees and a few benches. There was a man sitting on a bench beneath a tree. He was wearing a turban. He seemed to be asleep.