I think it was Al-Ghazali who wrote that heaven is surrounded by suffering, whereas hell is surrounded by pleasures. Seen from up on the forested hill where my house is, the town I live in looks like hell in the summertime. Tourism is a trade in pleasure, and people in a tourist town are indeed surrounded by pleasures. So Al-Ghazali was right: I am in hell because I am surrounded by pleasures. Sartre is also right when he says hell is the others. Their pleasure is my hell.
The phone rang. A friend was calling to tell me that a DVD edition of the film Cannibal Holocaust had just arrived from America.
‘What’s that?’ I asked him.
‘A film about an expedition of film-makers, who come across a tribe of cannibals in the Amazon jungle,’ he said.
‘Sounds good for starters. What happens after that?’
‘Nothing much – the rest of the film is about the cannibals eating them. The distributors I got it from are called Grindhouse and specialise in the obscurest, most shocking and most repulsive films of all time,’ he explained, not without enthusiasm. ‘Imagine what I’ve just seen in their catalogue: there’s a whole range of films where people are put to the most terrible of tortures, raped, slashed open, quartered and eaten. There are also titles where it says No animals suffered in the making of this film. Get that?’ he yelled into the receiver.
‘I get it,’ I answered through my teeth.
‘They’re worried that some lovers of cannibalism, who watch movies of people being disembowelled, might feel squeamish about violence towards animals,’ he bellowed.
‘I’m afraid I get it,’ I said.
I realised I wouldn’t be able to read any more after that. There’s always something at the last instant which prevents me from reading. For reading and any kind of mental exertion I need leisure. If I never felt bored, I’d never write anything. And I was still bored now, as usual, but for some time I’d been unable to think why I should read or write at all and why it was important to ‘develop my mind’. I gave up all thought of reading and turned on the computer.
I couldn’t get onto the internet. The dial-up connection kept tossing me offline. The telephone exchange was overloaded due to the thousands of Kosovo-born tourists who were probably sending messages to their families in Western Europe. In the summertime, these Gastarbeiters like to show off the pittance they’ve earned by insisting on these two weeks of annual holiday which bring them only frustration: no matter how much they’ve strutted like peacocks and seduced young girls from Pec with their gold chains and ten-year-old Mercedes, the stench of the toilets they’ve cleaned and will go back to clean in Munich, Stockholm or Graz still sticks in their nostrils. Now they were back from the beach and frantically phoning and sending mails, driven by the need to communicate, despite being illiterates for whom every spoken word induced suffering like that of giving birth.
I was livid with contempt and antipathy, an abhorrence which flooded over me as completely and utterly as they say saints are suffused with love. I needed to see open space: the soothing emptiness of the sea; a blue unpolluted by people. I rushed out onto the balcony.
The first shades of night were falling. The sun was setting once more behind my great-uncle’s olive grove, which is what we called the hill laden with rows of overgrown olive trees. In fact, it was fifty hectares of viper- and boar-infested scrub blocking our view of the sea. My father claimed he had once seen ‘something otherworldly’ come down to land behind the hill. I never managed to convince him that it was just the sun. Evening after evening, we sat on the terrace waiting for darkness to fall. We watched in silence as the sun slowly disappeared behind the silhouette of the hill, which had always stood between me and the world. When the light was gone, my father would get up, state resolutely, ‘No way, that wasn’t the sun!’ and disappear into the house. From then on, the only sign of his existence would be strains of Bach which escaped from the dark of the bedroom, where he lay paralysed by the depression which had abused him for two decades.
That evening the hill caught on fire. Instead of feeling a breeze from the sea, I was hit in the face by the heat of the burning forest. The fire would erase all my father’s labours once more, I thought. After each blaze, the police scoured the terrain searching for evidence which would lead them to the culprit. Needless to say, they never found anything: not a single piece of broken glass or a match, let alone a trace of the firebug. ‘They’ll never find out who set fire to our hill, I tell you. How can they when the fire comes from another world?’ my father repeated.
When the hill burned the first time, he saw it as a sign of God: ‘My whole life had passed by without me even taking a proper look at the olive grove my uncle left me. Now there’s no olive grove left – just my obligation to the land,’ my father spoke with the fatalism so typical of this crazy, blighted family.
He built a fence around the entire hill. He worked his way through the charred forest step by step, breaking stones and driving hawthorn-wood stakes into the rock, as if into the heart of a vampire. Then he tied barbed wire to the stakes, which tore into the flesh of his hands. For months he came home black from head to toe like a coal miner who had just emerged from the deepest pit. And that’s what he was: a miner. He delved into the heart of his memories. He wasn’t clearing the charcoaled forest but digging at what was inside him, breaking the boulder which oppressed him, shovelling away the scree which had buried him alive. He came home all wet and sooty for months, until one day he announced that his work was done. The property was fenced in and cleared. He had built new dry stone walls and planted olive saplings. He took me and my mother onto the terrace and showed us my great-uncle’s olive grove for the umpteenth time. ‘I’ve resurrected it from the flames,’ my father pronounced.
When the hill burned the second time, he installed a new fence and planted the olive trees again. As if that was not enough work, he also built a barn. Then he brought in goats from Austria. His diligence went so far that he even minded them. That year he was a goatherd. During the day he would roam over the hill with the goats; in the early evening he would bring them back to the barn for the night. ‘The pasture is excellent this year –,’ he said, ‘fresh growth is coming up from the scorched earth, and so the goats are eating the best food. Now they’re fenced in, safe from the jackals, and have a nice dry place to sleep: like a five-star hotel,’ he was fond of adding.
My mother thought she knew the root of my father’s devotion to the goats. She claimed to remember from my grandmother’s stories that my great-uncle had tuberculosis. ‘He died of it in the end, too, but he owed the last years of his life to the goats,’ my mother said. ‘A goatkeeper came from Šestani and brought him milk. He lived on even after the doctors had written him off, thanks to that milk. He had no wife or children, only your grandmother – the wife of his deceased brother, your father, and those goats up in Šestani. He lived with your grandmother and your father, and the goats helped him survive,’ my mother told me.
Born in the coastal range of Crmnica, my great-uncle had left for America in his youth. He fled his impoverished village for New York, only to go hungry in the big city for the next three years. He slept in neglected warehouses and stole vegetables from the markets to feed himself. Occasionally he would kill a stray dog, and then he thanked the Lord for the skills with knife and stick he had learnt hunting birds on Lake Skadar. ‘After the first week I knew I’d succeed. I knew I’d survive,’ he later told his brother’s wife and her son. ‘I eked out a lonely living in the middle of New York as if I was up in the wilds of Montenegro.’ The boy stared, riveted, while he spoke about the dog skin he had