At least, she had said she was in love with him. But he intercepts himself with this impulse to question and potentially destroy. A long dormant inner voice - barely audible in its rustiness from disuse - speaks up. And resists this attempt at ex-post facto denigration of what they had shared.
Why this perverse temptation to eradicate something precious? To deny the richness of their relationship? They had loved strongly and mutually. Realisation of this had been slow to him. But the more potent for the delay of its registering. To he who was so distrustful – who, part from training, part from temperament, distrusted and doubted everything – it had meant he was alive.
Sarajevo 1984. Fire and ice.
Neither of them particularly sports-minded, they had nevertheless attended many of the events. How could one fail to be impressed? These athletes were the best in the world.
The cult of perfection had always fascinated him. In this context physical prowess was honed to a fine edge. And discernible in the gleaming blades of skates which described graceful arcs before their eyes.
The silhouette of a lone skier on a mountain. The exquisite poise before the executed leap. These people defied gravity. Married technical expertise to sheer poetry.
And then physical activity of a different kind afterwards. Poetry of another type. After a light meal in one of the cafes, surging with the life they scarcely contained, he and Maja would go back to his flat.
For a brief moment he sees again the rumpled bedclothes. A pair of shoes she had often worn; the late afternoon light illuminating the red and bronze pattern in their leather. Maja.
It was the aftermath he had relished most. The time when the passion had ebbed from him – been wrung from him – like water from a sponge. When they made coffee and chatted of nothing in particular (were those the only occasions on which he could do that without experiencing a sense of wasted time?) And later still. When, also stimulated intellectually by her presence, he had sat at his desk to write.
Less frenziedly in those days, less compulsively. She’d had a way of wrapping herself around him from behind, of laying her cheek against his back. As if connected to a low pulse current, he was both relaxed and re-energised by her proximity.
And re-experiences, for a fraction of a second, the exhilarating languor it had induced.
Can’t he at least slow the images that are now rushing back?
And in that way regulate, if not minimise, their capacity to hurt?
Until recently that had been possible. But as if in mocking inversion of his former conscious control, he is powerless to do so now.
He wonders where she is after these several years. Whether, in the hell they are now obliged to inhabit, she is alive at all. The circumstances of their parting had been brutal – the accidental death of her seven-year-old son. The loss of her loved only child had been devastating to her. And even precipitated a brief reconciliation with her former husband, who was as shattered as she. For a while he had been sure she would come back to him. As perhaps she herself had been.
But the wellsprings of grief were merciless. Though she soon re-left her former husband, she did not re-join her lover. Perhaps – given the love he knew she felt for him – she saw renunciation of their relationship as some form of restitution. Because while she never intimated as much, Dominic knew she blamed herself for Nikolai’s death. And was obscurely convinced that had she been home the day it happened - instead of with her lover - it would not have occurred. In the strange and sad bargains we strike with ourselves, perhaps ending their relationship was her way of paying the piper.
Beyond some brief telephone conversations, and one desolate meeting in which the frozen wastes surrounding them had mirrored the devastation of their emotional landscapes, he had never seen her again. In desperation, he had phoned her former husband in search of her whereabouts. But the man had known nothing; had himself been enveloped in a cloud of pain and withdrawal so dense it seemed a cruel imposition to try to penetrate it. Instead and extraordinarily, they had drunk schnapps together. And had a stilted conversation.
Maja! His suppressed grief is now ignited. It courses through his body as if lit by a fuse. He needs to find some way to arrest and contain it. To delay confrontation with it until he is strong enough.
Not now! He tells himself. I can’t cope with it now!
The difference this time is that he knows he can’t rout memory by deferral.
That he has reached the limits of evasion. Such intensity of feeling demands only engagement with it. And thus the risk of capitulation.
Had he known the consequences of denial he would never have attempted it.
But assimilating deep grief, assuming this to be possible, cannot be concurrent with the psychic desolation he now faces on account of the war. In a kind of Faustian pact, he tells himself that if he can just summon the energy to confront it later – to somehow dilute it for a short time longer – until- until -
Until when?
Recognition that he is yet again trying to fight with conscious will – with precisely what had propelled him to this perilous impasse – brings him up short.
Isn’t excessive mental control the source of his danger?
How, with the stakes so high, can he quarantine feeling yet again?
Perceiving one escape route to be denied, he reaches for another in the form of more questions. Why can’t the unalloyed pleasure of his time with Maja console, at least to some extent, for the pain of having lost her? And why, for him, should retrospective pain be so much stronger than recollected happiness?
3. Milos
One of hundreds of hastily conscripted `soldiers’, he stands in line like everyone else.
Perhaps because of the unwelcome opportunity it affords for thinking, being stationary is somehow the most taxing task of all. Provided it isn’t civilians you are attacking, not even fighting is as difficult.
But then perhaps he is no longer capable of thought. Maybe the random, disjointed images which assail him in these line-ups are the residue of immediate experience, like the twitching of a dismembered corpse. For his self has surely been extinguished in one of the many battles in which he has been forced to participate.
No, `forced’ is the wrong word.
After a surprisingly short period of time, which means his moral sensibilities must have eroded significantly, no degree of force had been necessary. Devoid of all feeling and agency, he is like a sleep-walker.
`Battle’ seems the wrong word too. It seems to dignify with some kind of plan or purpose what is totally senseless and shambolic.
But no, that’s not right either.
Because systematic ruthlessness is never haphazard.
As a child, he had read about battles. About the often heroic stature of the men who fought them. What he is engaged in bears no resemblance to those. And there are now no heroes.
Perhaps not even men.
Sometimes at night he is woken by the stifled moans of those around him. Initially he had seized on these spontaneous eruptions of suffering. Had seen in them confirmation, as well as consolation, that neither he nor his comrades had entirely abrogated human status. But with the first rays of dawn and return to consciousness, there is no acknowledgment of these nocturnal emissions, no meeting of eyes. It is as if anguish over the infliction of pain is indeed as pointless and irrelevant as guilt over masturbation.
Yes, we have ceased to be men.
Yet we are not all the same