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Authors: John K. Cox

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This translation is dedicated to the best set of language teachers a young American could have had: Frau Fritsche, Marilyn Jenkins Turbeville, Kim Vivian, Roger Weinstein, Magda Ger
ő
, Sibelan Forrester, Anto Kne
ž
evi
ć
, Piotr Drozdowski, Anka Blatnik, and Jana Kobav. Thank you!

And thanks are due too to Milo Yelesiyevich, my first editor on this volume, whose input and aid were invaluable to the project.

JOHN K. COX, 2012

1
. Ilan Stavans,

Introduction to

Dogs and Books

by Danilo Ki
š
,

The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990): 325.

2
. Karl-Markus Gau
ß
,

Auf dem Grunde des Pannonischen Meeres: Danilo Ki
š
,

Die Vernichtung Mitteleuropas: Essays
(Klagenfurt: Wieser, 1991): 128

129:

3
. Jovan Deli
ć
,
Kroz prozu Danila Ki
š
a
(Beograd: BIGZ, 1997): 38.

4
. Petar Pijanovi
ć
,
Proza Danila Ki
š
a
(Pri
š
tina: Jedinstvo, 1992): 69.

 

We will not catch sight of any romantic cell, cabin, or thatched-roof hut; before us will rise a multi-story stone edifice; the higher the floor, the colder it is to live there. Poverty, sorrows, misfortunes, ignorance, and illness drive a person higher, up one floor after another. While a person is down below, he or she is still interested in the colorful jumble of life and participates in it in some fashion, even though it has generally been incomprehensible and inaccessible to him since birth. (With the rise of civilization the number of people

maladjusted to life

grows

one should not lose sight of that fact.) The more that life pushes a person up to greater and greater heights, the colder it gets for him or her, and the less one is capable of comprehending life and adjusting to it.


A.A. BLOK

I listened to invisible trains weeping in the night and to crackly leaves latching onto the hard, frozen earth with their fingernails.

Everywhere packs of ravenous, scraggly dogs came out to meet us. They appeared out of dark doorways and squeezed through narrow openings in the fences. They would accompany us mutely in large packs. But from time to time they would raise their somber, sad eyes to look at us. They had some sort of strange respect for our noiseless steps, for our embraces.

Some heavy blue autumn plums dropped onto the path from a shadowy tree whose branches jutted over a fence. I had never believed that such firm blue plums could exist in autumn. But back then we were so preoccupied with our embraces that we didn

t pay any attention to things like that. And then one night, in a startling flash from the headlights of an old-fashioned car, we noticed that a band of dogs, which had so far followed us silently, was gathering plums, almost reverentially, from the gravelly road and the muddy ditch. All at once it became clear to me why the dogs were so silent and dejected: these wild autumn plums had contracted their vocal cords, as alum would. I heard only the pits, with which they were allaying their hunger, cracking between their teeth. It looked, however, as if they themselves were ashamed of all this; as soon as the car cast the unexpected illumination of its headlights, they hid in the ditch next to the road, though the ones who hadn

t had time to get out of the way remained stock still, as if petrified.

Then the car stopped all of a sudden and out came a man in a sheepskin coat.


Strange,

he said, but I couldn

t see to whom he addressed these words. I couldn

t tell if there was anyone else in the vehicle because the light wasn

t on.

The man in the sheepskin squatted next to the dog carcasses and contemplated them for a long time, repeating the words

Strange! Strange!

We flattened ourselves against a cracked old wall in the shadows and held our breath. The only other thing we saw was the man getting back into his car and switching the headlights back on.

It was only when the automobile was already moving down the road that the engine roared to life. That

s when it dawned on me how the man in the sheepskin coat had managed to take the dogs by surprise. The car had been rolling down the road with no lights, in neutral, with the cunning of a wild animal; and the wind was blowing in the opposite direction.

Then we jumped over the ditch and halted at the spot where the car had stood just a moment before. Both of the dogs lay on their right sides, almost symmetrically arranged next to each other. One of them was an old bulldog with a simian snout that the tires had mutilated; the other was a small Pekinese with a medallion around its neck. I stooped down to look at its collar. The following words were stamped into the yellow medallion, no bigger than a fingernail:


Larron. Crimen amoris
.

I hoped that I

d find a notice in the newspaper, that I

d be able to make a statement and give the medallion back to the dog

s owner, but I was never able to find anyone advertising for his return.

Therefore I took the medallion to a goldsmith one day, after I

d convinced myself that there was no reason not to consider this piece of gold my personal property.


Larron
means swindler,

said the goldsmith without looking up at me.

I was astonished.


That was my dog

s name,

I said to conceal my embarrassment.


Strange!

he remarked.


He liked to steal plums.


Plums?

said the goldsmith, looking up at me.


It cost him his life,

I said.


Strange,

he said.

And you want me to make you a ring out of this?


Yes,

I said.


Hmmmm,

said he.

Of course, that

s your business.

Then I said,

You mean you really can

t make a ring out of it.

In those days I didn

t pay any attention to trains. But they tormented me with their screams without my even being conscious of it. Some kind of dark presentiment grew in me, a dread of their howling.

Nonetheless I said one evening, to my own surprise,

I

m afraid of trains.


You aren

t afraid of anything,

she said.

You don

t need to be scared.


I

m also afraid of dogs,

I said.


Oh!

she said, but she was unable to say anything more. The moment she had rounded her mouth to say

oh,

I glued my lips to hers, so that our kiss intoned a dark note of repentance, a hollow, protracted

oh . . . oh . . . oh . . .

which swelled up and thinned until it burst with a light pop, like a bubble.


Oh!

she repeated, and now her voice was huskier, more intoxicated.


What

s wrong with you tonight?

she said.


I shouldn

t have said that. You shouldn

t have permitted me to say it.


What?

she asked.


That thing about the trains and the dogs. I shouldn

t have verbalized that. If I hadn

t mentioned it, I wouldn

t be thinking about it now.

We lay in the dry leaves next to the railway embankment.

I have never been able to explain what goes on inside me. As soon as I sense, from a slight rumbling of the ground, that a train is approaching, I am overcome by my masculine instincts and some sort of anxiety, agitation, which compels me to dash under the wheels.


Hold me,

I said.

Tight.


Are you frightened again?

she asked.

There aren

t any dogs here. Or did you hear something?


Yes,

I said.

The cracking of pits between their eye-teeth.


That

s the watchman making his rounds.


No,

I said.

Just hold me tight.

As the train thundered past, making a whirlwind of the withered foliage that we had thrown together in a pile, I trembled, on the verge of fainting. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, I began to sob.


Take a look!

she said.

Look!

It was dark enough that I didn

t need to blush. Furthermore, I wasn

t even ashamed of crying. I thought about coming up with an explanation for her, but I gave up on that too. I even liked the fact that I had cried in front of her.


Look here, you lunatic!

she repeated.

Look what I found.

Only then did I open my eyes.

She was holding a blonde rag doll in the palm of her hand. I took hold of its chintz dress with two fingers, pulled up its little skirt, and laughed out loud.


This is our baby,

I said.

Immaculate conception.


You

re making fun of me,

she said.


No, I

m not.


Good,

she said.

Let

s baptize her.


No,

I said.

Let

s toss her under a train. She has a snout like that bulldog that the car ran over.

She looked at the doll

s face for a moment, then gave a small cry and flung her, spinning, over the embankment.

I felt nothing but the sawdust from the doll

s guts coating my face like sand.


Strange,

she said, when she had torn herself away from my lips.


Yes,

I said.

What

s strange?

She lay on her back in the withered leaves, staring up at the dark night sky.

But all the stuff between us had started a long time before that.

Back at the time I think I first met her, I was feverishly demanding answers from life, and so I was completely caught up in myself

that is, caught up in the vital issues of existence.

Here are some of the questions to which I was seeking answers:


the immortality of the soul


the immortality of sex


immaculate conception


motherhood


fatherhood


the fatherland


cosmopolitanism


the issue of the organic exchange of matter and


the issue of nourishment


metempsychosis


life on other planets and


out in space


the age of the earth


the difference between culture and civilization


the race issue


apoliticism or
engagement


kindness or heedlessness


Superman or Everyman


idealism or materialism


Don Quixote or Sancho Panza


Hamlet or Don Juan


pessimism or optimism


death or suicide

and so on and so forth.

These problems and a dozen more like them stood before me like an army of moody and taciturn sphinxes. And so, right when I had reached issue number nine

the issue of nourishment

after having solved the first eight problems in one fashion or another, the last addition to the list turned up: the question of love . . .

Broken down into its component parts, this issue had

in a concrete case

the following determinants:

Question
: What color are her eyes?

Hypotheses
: Green, blue, blue-green, the color of ripe olives, aquamarine, like the evening skies over the Adriatic, over Madagascar, over Odessa, over Celebes; like the sea at Bra
č
, at the Cape of Good Hope, etc.

Question
: The color of her hair?

Hypotheses
: Brown, blonde, like fairy hair, hair like the Lady of the Lake

s, the color of mellow moonlight, of pure sunny flax, of a sunny day . . .

Her voice?

The voice of a silver harp, of a viola with a mute, of a Renaissance lute, the voice of a Swedish guitar with thirteen strings, of Gothic organs or a miniature harpsichord, of a violin staccato or a guitar arpeggio in a minor key.

Her hands, her caresses?

Her kisses?

Breasts, thighs, hips?

So, this is how she came striding up to me, with this precious baroque burden, with the gait of a tame beast of prey and the wind in her hair.

It was like this:

It was right when I

along with Billy Wiseass

wanted to dedicate myself to philosophy, and we had without much effort just arrived at that famous ninth problem, when he proposed that we skip it, since it was pretty vulgar and of no interest to real philosophers, and instead dedicate ourselves to astronomy and begin that whole business about the stars and planets.

Naturally I agreed.

To this end we sold all our things (that is to say, his coat and mine, and several books that we had wrung out like lemons and thus could have tossed into schoolhouse urinals anyway) and moved into a
mansarda
, a small attic loft on the outskirts of the city. There we gaped at the stars day after day, or rather night after night, and discovered several galaxies we had never before heard about or seen. We christened one star from the constellation of Orion

Undiscovered Love,

and a second one

Billy Wiseass,

and a third star we christened with my name (let

s let that stay a little secret), and a fourth we named in a straightforward and pretty vulgar manner: Hunger.

In this way we justified our inconsistency and our return to the grand and unworthy question bearing the cabalistic number
9
.


Allow me,

I said,

to introduce my friend to you: Billy Wiseass.

BOOK: The Attic
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