Death in the Museum of Modern Art Page 2

  ‘Poor Pehfogl!’

  Her sister-the-beauty glanced at the little bag lying in the corner. The day before she had found the little silver spoon in it, an anchor left over from a long-since sunken ship. It was like the last act before the scene in which the extra with the halberd and bushy sideburns was supposed to rush in. A plush curtain hung over their heads.

  And there was silence in the large room for a long time after that. As though in apprehension and evil foreboding. Who was the extra to look at now when he shouted Pehfogl in his booming voice? Now that the unfortunate Dafna bird had expired on the bridge between there and here?

  GREETINGS FROM THE BESIEGED CITY

  Thirteen for ten!

  If twenty years had passed since that evening, rather than two, I would still have been certain that this was the offer he had chanted in his sing-song voice. He had a face that would have inspired titles such as Boy in Blue, Boy with a Tear in his Eye, Boy with Rose ... It was hard not to be sentimental about a face like that.

  But we both recoil from such emotions. We know all too well how awkward one feels when they subside. Even on summer beaches we read serious books. When the sun’s star paints the sky orange, purple, violet, red, one of the two of us says drily (we seem to take turns from one evening to the next, like conscientious watchmen):

  ‘Well, have we had enough Greetings from the Adriatic?’

  We mean the picture postcards of sunsets inscribed Greetings from the Adriatic. In the evenings tourists buy them at street stalls and send them inland, to cities where the asphalt is melted by the heat of summer and women’s thin heels sink helplessly into it.

  We don’t buy postcards like that, even if, in the absence of any others, it means not writing to our friends and family at all. We did not succumb until that evening when we caught sight of those awful postcards in the hands of a boy standing at the beginning of the main street in Dubrovnik, near the Onofrio Fountain. He had arranged the thirteen cards, all identical, in two unequal fans. Cooling his flushed face with the larger one, he held out the other with the full length of his thin arm, like an outdated traffic signal. He was the Boy with Postcards, Boy by the Onofrio Fountain. Boy at the Entrance to Dubrovnik. Boy Leading one into the First Temptation!

  In fact, there had already been similar temptations. Like the one to which I had ingloriously succumbed several months before. At that time, our little boy was already very good at distinguishing letters but he steadfastly refused to read. He would press up against me, thrust a favourite book into my hands and mutter:

  ‘Read it!’

  He maintained a dedicated silence. While I read aloud and my mouth grew dry, he would gaze calmly at a fixed point, without turning his head towards the book.

  That spring before Dubrovnik (it was an unhealthy, sickly spring which instead of luring the buds out of the old trees, turned sensible people sentimental!), I had been reading him a little book by Paul-Jacques Bonzon, The Seville Fan, a remnant of my own childhood reading. The original title was L’Eventail de Seville. Those were the first foreign words I had memorised, never having managed before that to reproduce the little Czech songs my father used to sing as he shaved. That was how he daily revived the language of his four-year bachelorhood in the country with the prettiest sound for the letter c. I remembered the French title of Bonzon’s book because my romantic younger aunt, who had been born an old maid, used to come up to me while I was reading it, and ask, expressing her agreeable surprise each time by a movement of her eyebrows:

  ‘Oh, so is my little fair-haired girl reading L’Eventail de Seville? Little fair-haired girls ought to read L’Eventail de Seville. L’Eventail de Seville ...’

  She would lean over me and I would be suddenly overwhelmed by the scent of lavender and heather. I would close my eyes and whenever my aunt repeated L’Eventail de Seville, I would feel on my cheeks and eyelashes the caress of fresh air, as when you wave a fan briefly and rapidly in front of your face. Ever since then, when it is stuffy and oppressive (more under my skin than on it) I repeat two or three times in a half-whisper:

  ‘L’Eventail de Seville. ’

  Oh God, will I manage it at the final and irrevocable ... at that moment when no earthly language any longer has power? When all fans are forever closed?

  But, that question has nothing to do with the day when I was reading The Seville Fan to my son. If it has, it will be established without words. So, it happened that the now grown up, former little fair-haired girl was reading her son a book whose main character was called Pablo. The poor young man sold orchito, a kind of Spanish boza, a millet drink, and he fell in love, youthfully innocently, with Juanita who sold fans ... And so on, and so forth ... In the end Pablo dies. It happens! In books as in life. But you feel uncomfortable reading that to a boy who is listening to you, holding his breath angelically and staring at one spot, still believing someone else’s eyes as they run over the printed pages of a book. But, does it not say in some important pedagogical material that, among other things, books accustom children to the fact of death? The lesson pales when it turns out that the child’s parent must also accustom himself equally painfully to the child’s getting used to death. On one occasion the parents of our boy (to avoid the sentimental ‘we’!) had become heavily involved in such speculation when one of them cut the discussion short (hurrying to watch a football match on TV!):

  ‘The best thing would be to give him that book Death by Vladimir Jankelevich. And in French, definitely. In the original. Then, before he gets used to death, he will get used to the French language. After that everything will be as smooth as milk ...’

  That ‘smooth as milk’ isn’t some foreign expression and the father of our child generally uses it when he’s annoyed and when he means that everything is already going as it should and one should not blaspheme. And that matter of the book Death and Vladimir Jankelevich ... that’s a response to the fact that the mother of our child studied comparative literature and still has a huge list of books whose titles contain the word death. Jankelevich’s title is underlined in red. That means that the book is not translated into our language. It was written in French but, alas, after L’Eventail de Seville I never succeeded in learning more than a couple of hundred French words. Unfortunately, writers have not yet learned to write within such a restricted framework. That is why on my list Jankelevich’s book is still a precious point of unexpended expectation.

  Luckily (or not!), The Seville Fan was long ago translated into our language. But, what does that alleviation in the process of accustoming a child to death mean in the face of the fact that you are approaching the page on which the main character dies, and at the same time you can feel the incomparable warmth of your own child against your body.

  To be brief and truthful... I confess that this time I succumbed. I suddenly decided to change the ending of the book. Of the top of my head, without previous preparation! It took quite a lot of presence of mind (not something that is taught in comparative literature courses) to prevent the boy noticing the change in the tempo of my reading and the uncertainty in my voice which was more a consequence of my being unaccustomed to lying than to improvisation.

  And so Pablo succeeded in not dying, which he was, after all, not accustomed to. Because, when I exhaled and put the closed book down, in its printed pages he was still dead. As I was pronouncing the sentences that were not in the book, it seemed to me that, for the first time in our reading sessions, our boy turned his eyes away from their fixed point. He glanced suspiciously at the book then at my face. A pedagogue would say that he was beginning to get used to the fact that parents tell lies. Or that they become accustomed to sentiment!

  I exhaled again in a manner more suited to a person to whom an injustice was being done than one who was in some way sinful. For the first time I thought with understanding of Otilija T., red-haired, intelligent and imaginative, but with a trace of unhealthy fever in her eyes. Many years had passed since we first met. We had known each
other for only a short time: we were together in our first year at university and for just half of the second. But still, I remember her more vividly than any other person in our joint photograph at the degree ceremony. If it is my place to judge, the fact that Otilija abandoned her studies of comparative literature was fatefully stimulated by an event that took place in our second year, during the January exams, in the office of a tall, grey-haired professor. He was someone who, during his lectures, had enjoyed listening to the sound of his own voice which was one suited to a theatrical stage. He always looked over our heads as though checking whether his voice was slipping too far away. He would pause and give a little cough, as though he were sitting on Greek Olympus at a time when the irascible gods lived there. And then he would start to speak theatrically again, but so as not to squander his precious voice.

  There were five of us that day in his office. It was raining and a high, dead branch which the gardener had not managed to cut off during the spring pruning, kept knocking tediously against the window pane, buffeted by gusts of wind.

  It was Otilija’s turn to answer. She was somehow especially different. ‘Like a snowflake on a summer’s day’, as that great Austrian writer whose books are an excellent weapon against shallow sentiment would say. Otilija was a special kind of snowflake. Ample, red-haired. But still, a snowflake on a summer’s day, a red snowflake on a summer’s day. She was unique. Simply a one-of. She was the unusual Otilija T. whom we had called Otikica from the first day. And she was just finishing her excellent answer. All at once the professor fell from his self-loving height into the shallows of a caustic intolerance. Later I realised that this happened to him when he felt that there was someone in front of him who might some day be able to stimulate far more scholarly fire than his cold voice and occasionally his barren pen had dispersed over the years.

  The professor asked, just as that dry branch began beating against the glass again:

  ‘And what was it, young lady, that happened to Anna Karenina in the end? Could you tell us?’

  We did not know then that this question contained, in concentrated form, all his sterility and ineptitude. But, even if we had known, we would not have been able to comfort Otilija T. that day. She suddenly became a little island that was hard to reach from the mainland. Her complexion and her hair united in colour. The source of that colour, however, was not her hair but an unhealthy fever in her eyes. Her hair was quite innocent, regardless of the opinions of theoreticians who make a connection between the colour of a woman’s hair and her character and temperament. Would my aunt, who used to recommend The Seville Fan to the readerly attention of a little fair-haired girl, have said:

  ‘ Oh, and little red-haired girls should read L’Eventail de Seville as well.’

  No recommendation of any kind could reach Otilija T. She was a torch, and you cannot blow out a torch. In a voice that we did not recognise, with a verve displayed by unhappy characters who want to change the world, alone and isolated, she said:

  ‘She married Vronsky. If I were a writer, every book would have a happy end!’

  She did not become a writer, even after this announcement. She soon transferred to a different course, situated in a building where dry branches did not knock against the window pane.

  She did well in her new course and found a good job. Books continued to have the kind of ends they have. On the whole unhappy, if one asked Otilija T.

  She was lucky enough to find a job. But, that was not yet the end. For a while I lost sight of her and then I heard that she had had a baby. Unlike Anna Karenina, whose child, although born out of wedlock, knew that it was blessed by the love and body of Vronsky, of Otilija T.’s child no one could say who the father was. And Otilija T. was silent. In itself, that matter of a child and its father need not be a prescription for an unhappy end. But somehow Otilija T., whom I chanced to encounter in the street pushing a large pram, struck me that way. Like an unfortunate heroine pushing her burden towards the last page of the book.

  There, by Onofrio’s Fountain, I thought again of Otilija T. She would have been glad to receive a Greetings from the Adriatic postcard. Not because she had displayed a weakness for sunsets. Simply because the card contained an abundance of the red colour that Otilija T. had liked to choose for her clothes. The colour of her hair was a gift of nature, but it was not decisive in her choice of clothes. Women’s magazines maintain that red hair and a complexion like Otilija T.’s look nicer with the colours of water and moss ... Otilija T.’s choices were largely guided by that fever let loose in her eyes.

  We did not, of course, buy the postcards. When we had moved some way from the Boy with Postcards, we were suddenly overcome by a desire for ice-cream.

  ‘The ones by Onofrio are best!’

  That was spoken by our boy’s father. His mother nodded in agreement. The boy was chasing an exhausted pigeon round Orlando’s column. He had already forgotten Onofrio. When the father returned with three ice-creams, the mother opened her mouth to ask whether that boy was still there. But she desisted, realising sensibly that they would in any case be going back the same way. It was hardly worth disclosing her aroused sentiment for five minutes of unquenched curiosity.

  The boy was sitting by the fountain. Now he was Boy with Ice-Cream. And he looked as contented as every boy licking an ice-cream did. Boy with Ice-Cream – that was an unusually striking image of innocent self-satisfaction. And, generally, everything there, between Orlando and Onofrio, was fine and noble.

  It was only Otilija T., pushing her pram in front of her up there inland, who left a mournful track. The track of the pram imprinted in the melting asphalt was accompanied by the track of her heels. The track of the pram reminded one of abandoned tramlines. Beside them, one heel left a deeper mark, the other a shallower one. That was just the way Otilija T. walked. Stepping out more vigorously with one foot, in an inspiration stimulated by the fever in her eyes. With the other foot, it was as though she had changed her mind in mid-step.

  In the autumn, when the first grey rains were falling and our summer suntan was fading, I discovered that the fever in Otilija T.’s eyes had been given a diagnosis. She went to hear it, when they took her away, after something terrible happened to her and her child.

  She was sent to a hospital on the edge of the city, somewhere I never had reason to go. It is only when a city becomes a besieged city that you acquire a burning wish to reach its edges. Then you are drawn by a strong desire to step over the ring imposed on you by force. Then you gradually realise that there are always rings around you, albeit invisible and not always imposed malevolently. You cross them on those quite ordinary journeys the aim of which is a summer holiday or distance that may easily be attained by the simple purchase of a ticket. And all that interests you then is that edge of the town where such journeys start. Not remotely the one where sorrowful hospitals are built, in dead-end streets.

  In the spring Otilija T. was back with her son. She was leading him by the hand now. When I met her like that for the first time, I greeted her, but she replied drily, not like that grey-haired professor, but like an automatic telephone answering machine:

  ‘Would you remind me? With whom do I have the honour?’

  I was taken aback and watched her as she walked away, without turning round. She was dragging the boy, just as red-haired as she was, determinedly. Even his clothes were red. In one hand, the one that was not clutched by a hand with nails painted with bright red polish, he was holding the end of a string at the other end of which hovered an overfilled pink balloon. It must have been Otilija T. who had blown it up. With all the strength of her lungs. It looked as though it was going to burst at any minute. Perhaps that was why I went on standing there for a while, watching Otilija T. There are some scenes that you simply must see. And not only scenes that afect you agreeably. Sometimes even unhappiness is seductive.

  But the balloon did not burst. At least not as far as my eyes could see. They reached a distance sufficient for that sa
d scene to become an idyllic image. The distance wiped from my sight the chipped rim of polish on Otilija T.’s nails. And the runny nose typical of little boys there is no one to care for. And the rash in the corners of her lips which patients in the hospital at the edge of town usually have. When these details had vanished and it was no longer clear whether that child in the distance was a little boy or girl (did red suit it, then?), the distance granted me a pleasant picture. As though prescribed for a happy end. Two red heads, a pink balloon .. One head represented the other as maternally solicitous. And the other represented its own long-term prolongation on the endless path of parental reproduction. No, there was no sense in which one head was missing. The father’s. It looked fine this way. Mother and Child with Pink Balloon. A nice title! The unbearable summer heat had not begun and the asphalt was not melting and there was no mournful track left after Otilija T. and her child.

  I soon forgot her again. Insofar as anything is ever forgotten.

  A year later the city was surrounded and outside the ring that held it cruelly tight, there remained a few of its edges, in one of which was the hospital where Otilija T. was a patient. I never discovered where she happened to be at the decisive moment. Since she had a diagnosis that made her life an exchange of residence between there and here, I could only guess. It could have been both, because the rhythm of interchange was not predictable or regular. On the other hand, it would have been best if Otilija T. had finally found herself outside any story about here and there. Somewhere beyond the space of their painful interweaving. Somewhere where life unfolds like a light, sweet succession of themes, like a simple quadrille: Boy with Rose, Mother and Child with pink balloon, Little Girl in Blue, Little Girl in Red ... And so on – without end. A quadrille has no end. Either happy or unhappy.

  But, empty desires aside, the city was surrounded and that, in itself, did not suggest a happy end. Red-hot balls were falling on the city. In an instant they transformed human bodies into bloody heaps of flesh. The most terrible thing, but unfortunately not the most infrequent, is when a mother’s shriek calls to her child as she stands over just such a heap. Then you wish that life was a book whose end was written by Otilija T. If Otilija T. is in the besieged city, then she is an island on an island. When you acquire the voice of an automatic answering machine, no one any longer expects you to get used to the fact that a living child can in an instant become a bloody little heap. You do not get used to the fact of death either, an ordinary one if there is such a thing, or to the page on which Anna Karenina throws herself under the train. If that is called madness, then I envy Otilija T. She calmed her madness in time. Domesticated it! Not waiting for it to be brought on by bloody little heaps of children’s flesh. Otilija T. departed into madness in good time.