A Handful of Sand

      Marinko Koščec

      Translated from the Croation by Will Firth

      Istros Books

      Istros Books

       London, UK

       www.istrosbooks.com

      Copyright © 2013 Marinko Koščec

       Translation © 2013 Will Firth

       Artwork & Design@Roxana Stere, 2013

      All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

      eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-908236-88-3

       The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author

      The man had been absent for so long

       that he finally ceased to exist for the woman he had left

       The woman was so torn by that thought

       that the man finally really did cease to exist.

      Jacques Sternberg, Absence

      * * *

      It’s snowing again; it must have started during that time where the night takes a break from its tormenting and delivers me to uniform blackness. You don’t hear it but you feel it behind the glass, and the noises from the street are softer, as if through cotton wool. The first bus came whining by at exactly five fifteen, picked up two frozen figures that embraced to maintain their uprightness despite the alcohol in them, snorted as if in disdain at such a modest morsel of humanity, and went grumbling off up Victoria Street. The rubbish containers were emptied at half past five. A snowplough went past, pushing the powdery snow from the road into piles which would later be taken away on trucks. Cars began to trickle by until they filled all four lanes heading for the inner city, like monstrous bees swarming in to drink at a source of poison; their humming would only gradually die away around midnight, together with the roar of the aeroplanes taking off and landing every fifteen minutes; so close that you can read the names of the airlines, one more exotic than the next.

      It falls night and day. After an hour or two’s break it starts floating down again, calmly, thoroughly, only letting through enough sun to remind you it still exists. People say they can’t remember such a cold winter; when the temperature goes up to minus fifteen you feel like going out in short sleeves. I still haven’t seen the Canadian soil, that thin layer they conceive maps on, beneath the crust of snow. The lake is frozen up, too; last weekend I took a bus down Red River and went for a walk alongside it, though it could only be sensed beneath the monotony of the white, white plain thanks to the wild geese shifting from one end to the other, riveted by memories or because they couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. Smells, too, are imprisoned in the ice, everything is sterile, white and muted, like a cold room in which we, both geese and people, wait for our autopsy.

      Every morning I wake up at five. A jolt, the beating of my heart, and then all I can do is stare into the same painful thoughts in the darkness; as soon as my conscious mind switches on, they’re there. For months they would at best recede a little to the demands of work, but never for an instant did they stop trampling me, digging away inside me and crushing me into ever smaller pieces. Yet things have improved since I arrived in Canada. My body has become hard and numb; when I’m stabbed, I’m able to smile. There’s nothing funny about it, but why not, we laugh. Why shouldn’t we have a beer and share a vulgar joke or two, ride on the underground, grill sausages, go to a museum or a strip-joint. Sure, I said, when Jeremy suggested we celebrate my birthday after I’d blabbed that I was born exactly thirty-three years before, to the day. He said that to please me, no doubt, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. Something told me he’d never seen a woman’s naked body before, let alone touched one. That just added to his mystical aura.

      While I sit writing at the kitchen table, Jeremy lies in his room eternally immobile like a mummy, all two metres of him lying lifelessly on his back. He has fifteen minutes more until his alarm clock rings. If it was the weekend, he’d stay there till noon. I don’t know exactly what makes him a mystic, but I have no other name for the harmony which emanates from him, for the feeling that he’s achieved absolute equilibrium, plenitude and well-roundedness within his own body in a way known to him alone. At first glance you’d feel sad at the sight of him lying paralysed–this giant of a man made of nothing but muscle with a basilical frame and a blond ponytail down to his belt; the felling of a centennial oak is more heart-wrenching than when an ordinary plum tree hits the ground. But there’s no need for sadness; he’s completely at peace with himself, smiles back at every glance, both at home and at work. Never once have I see him ruffled or heard him raise his voice. As conscientious as he is contented, as if it were exactly the way to attain nirvana, he demolishes walls with a jackhammer. At breakfast he stirs oatmeal in a pot until it turns to porridge, then he meditates over every spoonful. He answers questions gently and benignly and never asks any himself. Nor do I; he could hardly have found a more compatible flatmate. I don’t bring home visitors, I’m not loud, in fact I hardly make any noise at all, but here I am, without a doubt – at least physically. And he lets me know in his discreet way that he notices and appreciates that.

      Saturday the twenty-ninth of December: frying-pan hamburgers and pre-made chips with sachets of free ketchup, then an odyssey into the Winnipeg night in Jeremy’s rattly Chevrolet through the cosmopolitan quarter which has grown up near the airport, a labyrinth of fifteen-storey buildings with subsidised rents. And on through the tunnel formed by the aluminium monsters lining the road, or rather their outlines which faded away beneath neon aureoles and columns of thick smoke, and then through the ice-sheathed wasteland. And at the end a low, log cabin with the sign Nude Inn, adorned outside and in with long lines of little twinkling lights bulbs for the New Year. Here Jeremy and I celebrated my birthday and alternated in buying each other beers. He got the first round, then me, and then it was take turns once more. Each time we said cheers, exchanged significant glances, and in between were mostly silent. He looked towards the stage, but the expression on his face made you think of a rippling mountain stream and a fawn drinking from it. The girls performed their acts, alone or in pairs, wrapping themselves around metal bars or one another and demonstrating ever greater gymnastic prowess. In the break he said something in my ear, but the music was too loud and I was too tired. On the way back he added that we’d had an excellent table, and I agreed.

      The next day, and that was the only time, he told me a few words about himself, with the same softness in his voice and the same impassive smile. He’d recently moved here from a small town fifty miles further north after the firm he’d worked for went bankrupt and the aunt he’d grown up with died, as well as his twin brother. His aunt never married; she’d developed multiple sclerosis long ago and been immobile for the last twelve years of her life. His mother had been taken away when he was five by the hand of his father–or an axe, to be precise. He’d never seen his father sober. After prison, he saw his son now and again in the house of the widow with whom he started a new life, but he soon lost that too, in a fire caused by smoking drunk in bed. And his brother had died just last year when a hunting rifle blew up in his face. Jeremy liked it here in Winnipeg and was completely happy with his job.

      I went out before lunch, into the flaying cold. After fifteen minutes of rocking from foot to foot, the train arrived empty. The doors opened and closed pointlessly at the stations until the train dipped underground, signalling its approach to the city centre. A handful of people got in, muffled from head to toe, and rushed to huddle up on one of the heated seats. I got out at Yong Street. There were still a few shops open in Chinatown. Steam emerged from a bakery, through cracks in the dilapidated windows. I went in and bought a bag of crab and pineapple crackers from a shrimp of a man who didn’t stop thanking me even after I’d left; waving to me once more through the bedewed window pane. The only thing I remember about that afternoon is that I spent some time leafing through books in the subterranean shopping mall which had sunk into apathy after the fever of Christmas, although neon promises were still