And Jaglika told it to me like this: ‘The dark corridors are the basement where we used to live; it was always dark; you were sick with scarlet fever; that’s when Dr Vlada used to come by, every single day… Do you remember Vlada?… He checked in on you… You weren’t good for anything, and we all thought you were going to die…’
Thus, according to Jaglika, the little pictures on the walls were flypaper strips, and the pieces of paper were prescriptions; since it was dark, the fact that it seemed like midday to me was the result of a large high-wattage lamp, which Dr Vlada would turn on above my head, and so forth.
Fantastic! Jaglika thought it all up; indeed Jaglika did think it all up, as did I, incidentally! Never, and I knew this for sure, never did we live in a basement; we never had sticky fly-paper tape on our walls; and especially never any lamp with a big bright bulb; I never had scarlet fever, and so on … After several similar attempts (a tale told to Jaglika; with her just fabricating it differently) I was no longer capable of differentiating what was Jaglika’s from what was mine from what was a third party’s, that Jaglika, as demiurge, truly remembered (the right of the creator is untouchable even when she is lying). It seemed to me that I was again getting tangled in a snare (what a stupid animal!) of other people’s memories, no matter whether real or fabricated, and that the imagined freedom of emptiness has the shape and the sizzle of a lie, a lie from Jaglika’s cracked lips. I gave up on talking to anyone, save to myself, in the evening, in the dark, eyes wide open; along with all the others, I received a new power of imagination: I believed that every story was irrevocably true.
But Jaglika did not leave off; she enjoyed talking and watching my face full of trust (a creator also needs flattery); she extracted from her head piece after piece of outright lying (truly one never knows!), carefully, as if she were brushing lock after lock of her hair, which by the way did not exist; I did not have many opportunities, more precisely, I had just one possibility: ‘Baba, how about if I read the newspaper out loud. Eh, granny? Put those stories of yours away for now!’ Jaglika, however, would shake her head unhappily, bring her morning cup (full of dust – it was already noon) of tea (the orator was taking refreshment) to her lips and go on babbling; she just pushed those little extracts right into my ears, along with her lies, which were no worse than mine but for exactly that reason created unbearable confusion in my head. ‘Baba, stop it … That’s not important anymore, it’s the past,’ I said repeatedly; and then I would cover her in loud headlines from her favourite newspapers: woman is the pillar of the family, woman factory owner kills her child so her lover will marry her, directions for large and small needlepoint projects, freshen up your surroundings; and in this way, not stopping until I was dead certain that Jaglika had forgotten what she’d been recalling; and until she stopped grumbling: ‘OK, OK, but I’ve got a good one for you.’ Normally this took half an hour, sometimes less, and then Jaglika’s face would light up; then I would wander around the room looking for her glasses – she never knew where she’d left them just a moment before, but they were always either on the window sill or under her pillow.
II
A famous Yugoslav poet, a woman, well known in those days, in my house, in my room, while Danilo and Jaglika were sleeping; she had hung her polyester panties on the highest hook on my clothes-tree; she lifted her skirt part-way up (exposing her huge flabby thighs) and headed off to the bathroom; her lover lay on my bed, a man twenty years younger than she was, and hence a little older than me, with a low brow, a conspicuously low brow, and with long, bowed legs (that’s all I was able to see since the rest of his serviceable body remained under the blanket); the poet hadn’t shut the door, neither the one to the bedroom nor the one to the bathroom, and thus Danilo, who, judging from everything, hadn’t slept a wink since the two of them had entered the house, found her bent over the sink, with her legs spread (maybe under the sink!). There he stood, thunderstruck, and then he sprinted into his room, embarrassed, frightened; he stared at me, goggle-eyed (I was seated on the floor) and at the poet’s lover on the bed, and then back at me, and slamming his door shut, he ran into his room without uttering a word, not even one letter of a word, not even a sound, without anything really (God, it was as if he’d been struck dumb by horror). In a little while the poet came by with her hitched-up skirt, asking for a towel.
That night I slept in Jaglika’s room, on a mattress; on the floor; right up till morning I listened to Jaglika’s diligent snoring, whimpering, and the grinding of her teeth. I was convinced that all this wasn’t coming out of her toothless mouth. Instead, the noises were souls, the souls of her Montenegrin-Hungarian ancestors, which, like all species of Hymenoptera, obdurately, annoyingly, the whole blessed night (the lamp on the table near the head of her bed was turned on – Jaglika was afraid to dream in the dark, and incidentally so am I) flew circles around her head, and from time to time around mine, probably remembering that I am Jaglika’s descendant. In view of the fact that my grandmother, with her Hymenoptera, the lamp she left on, the quinces beneath the radiator, the sputum in the old newspapers four thick under her bed, was in the other part of the apartment, I couldn’t hear Danilo’s creeping about or his pacing, clearing his throat occasionally (like the kind in movies about fear and terror) in front of the door to the room in which the poet and her lover were sleeping. They were going to tell me all that the next day. Among other things, that Danilo at least ten times during the night (so the poetess said, but poets, male and female, love to exaggerate of course) opened their door all the way and just stood there, every time, in the door-frame, immobile, for several minutes (that’s what the poet said: several minutes) and, she said, for that reason the two of them couldn’t sleep a wink. At first they called out to him to come in, they turned on the light; the poet said she had not seen such a beautiful and spectral boy for ages; I told her that he would be twenty-nine this fall and that he wasn’t a boy, but she reiterated: ‘The little guy stared with those enormous eyes of his and he stood there, just stood there so awkwardly!’ Danilo does have bulging eyes, but otherwise, cross my heart, and cross something lower if I have to, there were a lot of things about this that mattered to her, but that doesn’t matter.
That day they left at noon; the lover rubbed his watery eyes, offering me at the same instant his other hand, small and perspiring, but warm; the poet was visibly angry, and she didn’t say goodbye, but Danilo said, from the doorway when the two of them were in the lift, happily, serenely, like he was hitting a ping-pong ball their way: ‘Why didn’t you go to a hotel? It definitely would have been more to your liking there!’
But then, in the very next minute, I hear the poet’s voice from the street: ‘Lidiaaa! Lidiaaa!’ I ran down the stairs (I could have broken both of my legs). There was Danilo, dear God he was down there, how’d that happen so fast, just a moment ago he…
He was standing there clinging to her chubby upper arm like a little child as he said over and over, stuttering, with spittle on his lips and an incomprehensible plea in his bulging eyes: ‘Why don’t you come by for a visit… Why don’t you drop in…’ and then, catching sight of me: ‘Lida, tell them, tell her, Lida…’ The poet smiled, a touch maliciously and a little bit like a bad actress; the lover stared at Danilo like at a rabid (dangerous) but pathetic dog.
All that day Danilo kept on asking me, at short intervals, ‘Why didn’t you tell them? Why didn’t you say it, Lida?’ Not completely certain of myself, and pretty much exhausted, I replied that the poet and her lover had just left, a moment ago, or two hours ago, but for Christ’s sake really recently, and what could he want now, anyway, he had walked them out, he had seen them off all nice and proper, the poet and the lover with the officer’s cap pulled all the way down over his low forehead, and now they’ve probably gone to a hotel, or on to another city; ‘For God’s sake, Danilo, you told them to do that yourself!’
That’s when Danilo’s feelings of abandonment started to grow: he ran after unknown people in the street, he turned people back as they left our building, he called out to them from the window, beseeching them, making them swear, acting like a cry-baby to get them to return, to drop in on us; and all of them save Marko (Danilo’s friend from senior and primary school) shook their heads (as if they were sages), swaggered about and thought and stared the