Dogs and Others. Jovanovic Biljana

to be with Marina, or to Ljubljana to ‘those super-duper relatives of yours’, came to naught. She didn’t stop chewing the cud with those ground floor dopes, for months, and even the building next door lived and breathed various little stories about morality and immorality. Then one day, these folks (the husband, wife, and niece), simply vanished, and I assume it was because they lost some court battle about the apartment. Jaglika came back depressed, and quarrelsome, and jumped all over me whenever I uttered a word; once again nothing was good enough, I was a bullshit-nik, a gypsy, a bum, and a ‘super-whore’ and ‘that girl’ and so on and so forth …

      In the year 1970-something, everything was the same, or similar, which is the same thing when you’re watching from the side-lines. My isolation was supplemented by letters from an anonymous author, about whom nothing was known: sex, age, inclinations, desires, origin, occupation, and the rest, but especially the rest – as is the case with all unknown authors, despite which everything appears to be authentic, so the only thing that’s questionable is the fabrications of all kinds of (anonymous authors in all epochs; in all lands) in essence trivial people, although it is customary to think of these people (anonymous authors) as paranoid – which means danger, and to think of shutting them away, for example, in a prison or in a hospital or in both. Vespasian’s letters appeared like a bolt from the blue; I don’t know any other way to explain it; it’s not necessary to explain it any other way; after all, Vespasian was himself a heavenly figure, and as for what objects become intermediary (postal-postmanly) there’s no use racking one’s brains about that! Doubts and, generally speaking, various outbursts of rationality and scepticism in regard to divinity, the heavens, heavenly figures, and letters, are not advisable, even if a letter is unnecessary; even if Vespasian is a pure fabrication. In any case, my reading of his letters, (which always arrived bearing no signature, with crumbs, fingerprints, and stains on them), can’t be anything but superfluous to the same degree. No more or less so, exactly the same amount: identically so.

      The Roman Vespasian was probably given his name by his mother; my Vespasian got his name according to some sloppy principle of association, occurring at the same instant, that is to say, when the letter arrived. It was so imbecilic and without imagination, like when someone unexpectedly gives you a Maltese terrier. What’s the point here, and where are we going with this obvious insufficiency of imagination? One night (around the same time that this first imperial letter came in, if it wasn’t that exact same night) I slept with a guy I’d picked up when I was wasted, in a café or on the street, I can’t remember anymore. For the most part guys like that weren’t so awful; however, when you take into account criteria of a more serious nature (which assumes that I rule out all sentimentality aimed at myself), he was incomprehensibly bad; but despite that, and some other things (sweat, stink, and stupidity) he was simpático, with his little pale red member, his large, protruding lower teeth, and his eyes that bulged just a touch; he was charming, despite being a dimwit, and after all what would intelligence mean to him in life – a big dick or at least a thick one, maybe, but brains? And that’s how this name came to be, not because I thought that night that I was sleeping (I imagined) with Vespasian of Rome, by means of mysterious powers, but simply like this: a cheerful bucktoothed pope (the newspapers were chock-a-block those days with news about the pope) and then all at once boom – Vespasian.

      I had found a solution to my paranoia: at the bottom of every letter I placed the signature: Vespasian. Sometimes in Cyrillic, sometimes in Latin script; I was thinking that in that way anyone (but then again, who?) who might be searching with the pedantry of the police through my drawers, folders, and boxes, might get confused and thrown off the scent for at least a moment; he would have to wonder, at first, whether this ‘Vespasian’, sometimes Cyrillic and sometimes Latin, in both printed and cursive letters, now in red ink, now in blue or black, whether this wasn’t some code and a subcode of that same code, and, then, whether or not I myself had written these letters to myself, or whether I’d written them (me again) with the intention of sending them to someone, and so on and on …

      Roman Vespasian had received, at the start of his imperial career, pulled out of a drum, like on a game show, Africa; later he fell on hard times and dealt in mules, but I’m willing to bet that at that point he knew an empire awaited him; he could tell everyone to fuck off. My Vespasian is an invalid; in his restricted province of life he has issues with his daughter, his wife, and himself, which is incomparably harder: the arc is smaller and, logically, the prospects are too. That other Vespasian had firm, short limbs, while this one of mine mentioned in several letters that as a young man he was tall, slender, smart, and handsome. Neither one of them should be believed.

      Vespasian’s letter:

      Dear Lidia,