Jelena Lengold
FAIRGROUND MAGICIAN
Translated from the Serbian by
Celia Hawkesworth
The publisher wishes to gratefully acknowledge the support of the SERBIAN MINISTRY OF CULTURE in the publication of this book.
About the author:
Jelena Lengold is a storyteller, novelist and a poet. She has published six books of poetry, one novel (Baltimore, 2003, 2011) and four books of stories, including Pokisli lavovi (Rain-soaked Lions, 1994), Lift (Lift, 1999) and Vašarski mađioničar (The Fairground Magician, 2008, 2009). She has been represented in several anthologies of poetry and stories, and her works have been translated into several languages. Lengold worked as a journalist and an editor for ten years in the cultural department of Radio Belgrade. She then worked as a project coordinator in the Conflict Management programme of Nansenskolen Humanistic Academy in Lillehammer, Norway. She now lives and writes in Belgrade, Serbia.
About the translator:
Celia Hawkesworth taught Serbian and Croatian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London, 1971-2002. She has published numerous articles and several books on Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian literature, including the studies Ivo Andrić: Bridge between East and West (Athlone Press, 1984); Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia (CEU Press, 2000); and Zagreb: A Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 2007). Her translations of Dubravka Ugresić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender was short-listed for the Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation, and The Culture of Lies won the Heldt Prize for Translation in 1999. This is her second book for Istros Books, the first being Odohohol & Cally Rascal by Matko Sršen.
First published in 2013 by
Istros Books
London, United Kingdom
copyright Jelena Lengold, 2013
Translation copyrightCelia Hawkesworth, 2013
Artwork & Design@Milos Miljkovich, 2013
Graphic Designer/Web Developer -
This novel was first published in Serbian as Vašarski mađioničar, Archipelag, Belgrade, 2008
The right of Jelena Lengold to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
ISBN: 978-1908236104
Printed in England by CMP (UK), Poole, Dorset
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
‘Listen, I am going to impart to you once again a comfortless truth, and I shall continue to do so until you become entirely aware: we are helpless, we give in to inertia, people never cease to wound us. The world oppresses us. Like an insupportable itch. And an itch, they say, is a mild pain.’
Mihajlo Pantić, from the story ‘What I am to myself’
‘… a certain relaxation in realising that we are all destined to be losers, only each of us has a different way of allocating the bitter taste of failure.’
Dragan Velikić, The Russian Window
CONTENTS
Zugzwang
Aurora borealis
Nosedive
Wanderings
Pockets full of stones
Senka
Sky
Get thee to a nunnery
Snickers
Under the guise of highbrow literature
That could have been me
Had I been born just a few minutes earlier, I could have been Victor. Every time a plane takes off and gravity presses me into my seat, I regret that I am not.
Victor owns a little chemist’s shop, on the edge of town. On one side of his shop, there is a watchmaker. On the other, a newsagent where he buys his paper every morning. Even while he was still studying pharmacology, Victor dreamed of arranging various little bottles of medicines on clean white shelves and knowing the exact function and dosage of each individual remedy.
There was something about medicines that had fascinated him since his childhood. He remembered that his grandparents always had lots of medicines in their house. In the kitchen there were two large drawers full of them and, as a child, Victor used to open up that world of danger and prohibition the way some other children open books of fairy-tales.
There were ordinary tablets, then capsules of various colours, different kinds of ointment, red rolls of sticking plaster, a small transparent bottle of iodine with a little cork stopper, nose drops, eye drops, a thermometer in a dilapidated cardboard box, plasters for his grandmother’s blisters, liquid smelling of peppermint sweets that was rubbed into the forehead of anyone with a headache. There were remedies which were long past their sell-by date, but his grandparents did not discard them because you never knew when you might need something.
Victor was convinced that it was precisely there, standing in front of that drawer, that he had learned to read, opening each individual box and reading the usage of each medicine.
His favourite game was collecting various different capsules in one little bottle. And there were all kinds of combinations: there were transparent capsules through which granules could be seen, then there were those that hid their contents behind opaque plastic, there were some small and some larger capsules, and the more different specimens he could find, the richer he felt he was. He would take a capsule in his hand, shake it slowly by his ear and listen to the tiny granules rattling. Not all the capsules rattled in the same way. While he was still a child, Victor set himself the task of knowing, simply by its sound, with his eyes shut, which remedy he was holding in his hand.
His grandmother was appalled by his collection and kept reminding him that on no account must he ever swallow any of the medicines, which Victor thought then was an entirely senseless remark, because trying the remedies was not remotely the point; what mattered was possessing them and feeling them under his fingers, telling one from another and, in his childish way, controlling them.
He controlled the medicines, and the medicines controlled life. And death. About which no one ever spoke in those days, but it was present in a very obvious way in those big, extremely heavy drawers.
Later,