A Handful of Sand. Marinko Koscec
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wall, not one intended for looking out of.
It hurt to watch him diminish like that, both mentally and physically. He became bent and wrinkled, ridiculously small for the couch which was his prison; he devoted his days to the window and in the evenings hovered in the grey zone between the TV chat show and dozing off. For several months they took him to work, a bit like they cart away domestic rubbish. He resigned before the end of his term of office and before reaching retirement age, ‘for health reasons’. But these weren’t just of an emotional nature because all the ailments which had already been gnawing at him now gained momentum. Diabetes, gout, high creatinine levels, prostrate problems, painful joints, cardiac arrhythmia, a duodenal ulcer, insomnia, corns and cataracts: he was a gerontological showpiece. But he contributed to all that himself with intensive concentration, which he could direct depending on the acuteness of the problems and above all by groaning. With every step he took in the flat, and also when he went out to walk in the courtyard, he let out the sound of his suffering, such that until I moved out I was able to follow his every step as if he was carrying a beeper. Just recently he admitted that he groaned on purpose, self-therapeutically, in the hope that things would hurt less. Since pain can’t be seen, it’s easier to live with suffering if you hear it. Whatever.
Apart from shuffling to the corner shop, for years now he’s only been leaving the house to go to the Health Centre (is the sarcasm of that term intentional?) and the cemetery. He trudges back with his bags as if from martyrdom, groaning three times louder. When I cooked for him he only stabbed listlessly at the food, and the slightest criticism made him get up from the table, offended: This is the death of me, can’t you understand that?! He’d never been of the jovial kind. No frivolities interested him, not even spending time with friends. When Mother died, the rest of humanity passed away for him too. To those who phoned with words of encouragement or just with a conventional enquiry as to his health, he always replied with the same To be honest, I’m not well and never asked anything back. Oh, how many times did that honesty make me want to get up and strangle him just to cure him of his misconception that being honest like that was the best he could do, in fact the only thing he could do, for himself and others.
I never stopped missing Mother, but at the risk of sounding harsh, I also missed her when she was alive; a mother with human blood in her veins, whom you wish to confide in. Sometimes I feel the need to go to her grave, light a candle and sit for ten minutes. Not that I feel more of her presence there, but it’s soothing.
I never let my sorrow break the surface–because of Father more than myself. I felt that he hung from me like a thread. Today I know that was mistaken because he’s essentially been dead all this time. The fact that he can still take a few steps, and groan, doesn’t mean anything. I sought in vain for something to at least reanimate him a little. No antidepressants or psychotherapy, no pensioners’ excursions or stays at rheumatic clinics, not even his favourite pastries mother used to make or my quasi successes in life could evoke even a semblance of liveliness in him. At the same time, however dead he was, he cried out from the depths of his unconscious to share his suffering with me and for me to be part of it. It didn’t overly concern him that his need was also a hand dragging me into the grave. But I couldn’t muster enough self-respect to decide that it wasn’t my problem any more. And so, on the threshold of my own life, I became a mother to my much-lamented father.
Yet I couldn’t replace Mother or do anything for him. We’d lived alongside each other for so many years, separated by a vast sea of silence. I had pangs of conscience, but I gradually gave up trying to contrive words. All of them were destined to fall into a deep well. He didn’t even try and pretend that what I said meant anything to him, to wipe that nothing-matters-any-more look off his face for at least a second. We both knew very well how much harder it would be for him if I wasn’t around. So ever more often, when I left the study to check how he was doing, I would just stand at the door. He’d raise his eyes and we’d look at each other in a silence no words could unlock.
* * *
Although she accepted the blame, Mother didn’t consider the deadening of the woman in her, her sexual being, to be one of the forms of penitence. I don’t mean to say she was putting out or showing the world she was eligible; on the contrary, she cultivated an arrogant air of self-reliance and a neurotic gruffness in communication. But when the widower Gabriel came along and started to circle in on her, she didn’t need much convincing. Uncle Gabrek, as I had to call him, worked at an insurance company as a specialist in motor-car collisions and traffic-accident premiums. But the only thing which really interested him was fishing; he lived for the occasion–and that was almost every non-working day–to cram his deluxe fishing paraphernalia into the car and to drive off to a body of water, which if you were lucky was just twenty or thirty kilometres away. His expeditions were far from fruitless; he came back with bucketfuls, sometimes even with prize specimens. He liked to take me along as well, and I was too submissive to show what I really thought; he showed peculiar persistence in teaching me the secrets of the trade, the subtleties of choosing the right bait and position, the habits and psychology of different species of fish, etc. Mother prepared them in all imaginable ways, and he didn’t fail to admire her skill, most often with the words You can’t taste the silt in it at all, can you? If I was accompanied through to adulthood by incense and cigarette smoke, those two years with Gabrek owe their uniqueness to the reek of swamp water and fish entrails.
I was twelve when we moved in with him, after he’d called by at our house for months with his broad smile, smart suit, waistcoat, tiepin and slicked-back hair. He would tousle mine as a sign of affection, produce a bag of toffees from his pocket, and once even tried to take me on his lap. I never liked toffees, but Cat did. Cat, in fact, turned out to be a bone of contention when Mother was set to be married because she didn’t fit into Gabrek’s vision of a happy family; but just then the problem disappeared.
The period before their marriage was perhaps the only time when I felt something like happiness. I’d discovered books and knew their power to whirlpool me away into fictitious worlds. During the summer holidays I went to the library twice a day: in the morning for my daytime dose and again for my evening hit which would keep me in feverish vigilance and oblivion long into the night. I spent the rest of the time on my bike, which became Don Quixote’s Rocinante, the Orient Express, or a Mississippi steamboat. That little blue, wobble-wheeled bike had been salvaged from the scrap heap after some boy in the neighbourhood had outgrown it, and now I pushed it up the steepest streets of our quarter for the matchless feeling of zooming downhill, pedalling to increase my speed and perhaps break my own record, trying to hold on for just a second longer with my eyes closed.
I cruised streets full of ghosts and bleak castles for hours as a lone rider and avenger. Gabrek’s visits ushered in a Copernican revolution; Mother’s obsession with my behaviour disappeared and she was understanding of my absences from home. One place I liked to ride was in the enclosed grounds of the psychiatric hospital which our part of the city is known for. I was able to zip in past the guard, no questions asked, and then cheerfully trundle along under the green of the grand old chestnut trees. Or talk with the patients who were out walking in striped pyjamas, sauntering about with their arms folded behind their backs or waving them in the air in lively debate with inner voices. Many of them were happy to chat, and they came up to me whenever I stopped for a break and daydreamed on a bench or by the goldfish pond. It was here that I heard some very interesting life histories.
One day I even plucked up the courage to approach Zoran and see what he was drawing. Day after day, I found him sitting on the same bench, preoccupied with the paper on his lap as if nothing else existed. He was so tall that I thought he must have been some kind of giant, albeit a little bent from always having to lean down; his grey hair, cut in a somehow feminine way, grew thickly above an almost boyish face; and he had enormous hands, elegant and well-manicured, with long nails on both little fingers. He was a good-natured giant, because he was always smiling and showing his handsome teeth, but with such feeling and ephemeral emotion that I would take a piece of it home every time and shut myself away in my room without a word. I remember clearly the smell of flowers that came from him. The patients at the hospital generally needed to be kept at an arm’s length because hygiene at the hospital probably wasn’t high on the scale of priorities.