The Collector of Names (9 page)

"Yeah, except that babe who wasn't too bad," agreed Max.

"Well," said Samo, "she could be a bit fitter, her hips were too small."

"And her tits weren't very big either," grimaced Max.

In the background they could hear the clanking of the bottles as Alfonz arranged them on the veranda.

"I do like them to have big tits," went on Max dreamily, "but they have to be nice and firm!"

"Yeah, right," yawned Samo, stretching.

Every word cut into Raf's heart. How nastily they spoke of her! But even that was better than the silence after they had exhausted the subject of all the relevant parts of the female anatomy.

Raf got up:

"I'm going to help Alfonz."

He walked on the stones which slowly gave way to the thicker and thicker grass of the meadow. It was alright, he had been cunning enough, they did not suspect anything.

"Well, well, how excited our good friend Raf is about that chick," said Max as he flicked his cigarette end into the sea.

"Yeah," said Samo, "but I bet he's still a virgin."

"What else do you expect? He's so clumsy that he wouldn't be able to find his aim even if he found a woman stupid enough to let him try!"

They giggled quietly and turned towards the horizon, which was unbroken by ship or dry land.

*

Ana stopped in the harbour, which looked deserted. The sea there was greasy and dark, the bay itself was darkening, the lights in the houses were on, the hill behind the village had already obstructed the sun. There was no trace of the ferry and it seemed as if it would never return again.

She walked on the large paving stones and avoided stepping on the lines. She looked back at the shop which was now probably a bar and became aware of the pensioners on the bench. Because they were not talking and because of the twenty-metre distance she could not be sure whether they were looking at her.

Old men.

"I don't want to get old," she said to herself, "I want to stay as I am now," she added and felt silly. And a bit sad.

She stood there in the middle of the old men's horizon, the horizon which they had probably been staring at every evening for decades. She felt like a stranger and it was not a pleasant feeling. She went to the left side of the bay, stepping from the paving stones onto a concrete path, which after a few metres turned into the base of the monument.

The plaque said exactly what her uncle had told her: ‘Dedicated to the villagers who died in the war’. She could hear his voice again, telling her very casually and she was quite sure, honestly, the number of the victims worthy of the monument: zero. It really bothered her that that was exactly how much she understood about it all.

Her Mum and Dad had sent her to stay with an oddball. She believed he must have changed in the years since her Mum last saw him, so that his sister knew nothing about his illness, the strange attacks he was having. She hoped it was nothing dangerous or contagious. Her fear of the latter had nothing to do with reason. She remembered another detail from her childhood and she thought how strangely vivid her memories were that day. Maybe they were like that because she was far away from the flat where they all originated. Anyway, she used to think that being in plaster was contagious. No, that's not quite right. She did know that you had to break (or at least badly twist) a limb before you got it put in plaster, but at same time meeting anybody with one always produced this strange fear in her that she would become like that too. It had taken her years to learn to control the fear to the extent where it stopped being obvious to other people, but the feeling never quite disappeared.

She looked at the large monstrosity, the back of which had already fused with the dark sky behind. There was a group of clouds in the east which did not seem to be moving at all. Behind one of them she could make out the outline of the moon, which was not too far from the ragged edge of the cloud. Maybe she would be able to finish her walk in the silver moonlight.

The tank. A terribly ugly machine, which did not belong there at all. She looked towards the pensioners and wondered how they must have felt when the army positioned that monstrosity right at the tip of their bay. The second most visible point on the island was probably chosen only because the first had already been occupied by a lighthouse.

The barrel was pointing towards the hill and the plug at the end had been soldered on very badly, half of it sticking out. A large five pointed star had been white until someone had hastily and carelessly painted over with red.

Why had they not removed this monument? Had the old men on the bench just got used to it as a part of their horizon or could they simply not be bothered? A heap of old rusting metal, a military reject, which...

In the middle of the turret she noticed a small white sheet of paper with writing on it. She was standing too far away to be able to read it. She tried to get nearer, touched the metal and immediately withdrew her hand.

It was pleasantly warm, as you would expect from metal which had been standing in the sun all day, but it was also greasy. There was nowhere she could wipe the grease off her hand. She decided to go down to the sea and she immersed her hand in the water but it just slid across her fingers without removing anything. She had to rub her skin on a rough stone.

She threw an accusing look at the metal and started walking towards the other side of the bay where the lighthouse flashed into the darkness.

*

"I think we should take the drinks down to the cellar while there's still some daylight", said Alfonz.

They were still lying on the beach and the two cigarettes glowed in the dark. They had eaten the last sandwiches they had brought from home and had just had a good belch.

"Take it, take it," said Max and Raf could feel Alfonz looking at him but he continued looking at the sea. He just did not feel like getting up. Alfonz would manage on his own.

Alfonz hesitated and when none of his friends took any notice of him he went to the house. He got the torch and started thinking how he would manage the torch as well as the crate of beer. He turned the torch on, put it on top of the beer bottles, lifted the crate and started walking towards the cellar entrance. He would manage.

Only when he reached the stairs did he realise that his solution was flawed - the side of the crate cut off the bottom part of the beam from the torch. The stairs went down and Alfonz's light only shone on the ceiling. He tried to lean the crate forward but that made the torch slide so he had to just hope that after all those years all the stairs were still there and safe.

He tested each one first with the tip of his toes, then the rest of his foot and only then did he transfer the whole of his weight plus the load onto it. He counted each stair before standing on it, as if counting meant giving it a name, making contact, a request to be able to trust it.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Alfonz was aware of his heart beating. Suddenly it contracted, pushing all the blood out into the rest of his body. "Fear, this is fear!" realised Alfonz and he could not believe it. He racked his memory to find a reason, a comparison with a similar situation in the past. The nearest feeling was the one of returning home in the middle of the night, walking through the woods when suddenly tiny lights appear in the distance and you are not sure whether you have walked so fast that this is already home or whether the lights are the eyes of wolves (or other beings?) waiting for you. On top of it all, fear was too mild a description of how he felt: he could not move or breath. He flexed his muscles trying to tear himself out of this state but it did not work. His only hope was to give his fear a name, to identify it. He thought of a woman. Not any particular woman and especially not the neighbour from his village. It was an unreal being, a conglomerate, the collective noun for women. He was afraid of women. It was that simple. On the fourth step of a strange house he was overcome by fear raised to the thousandth potency, which appeared in its milder form whenever he thought (dreamed about?) losing his virginity. How could that small fear grow into a wall pressing against him? Pushing him back, out of the cellar, away from the woman?

He tried once more to push himself forward and this time he broke the barrier. He had given his fear a name and thus overpowered it. He stepped onto the next stair without testing it. His fear was gone. The only trace of it was a very unreal memory, which already seemed unbelievable to him.

He pulled himself together and went on counting and testing the stairs until he successfully reached the bottom.

The cellar was surprisingly big, it stretched under the whole of the building and it was empty except for some wooden crates in the corner, which reached up to the first window. Here too, everything was covered in dust, proving nothing had been touched - there were no footsteps either. Alfonz put down the beer and picked up the torch. He shone it around the room, mostly onto the crates, made of oak planks roughly nailed together. He went closer and bent over them. BOMBAY was burnt on the side of one. God knows what was in them when they first came over on a ship.

And what was in there now?

He touched the wood. It was old and dry, without a trace of wood-worm even though it was not painted or varnished. He tried to move the lid and managed easily. It was not nailed down.

He lifted it a few inches and shone his light inside.

Old junk. Clothes.

He tried another crate.

Old newspapers and letters.

And then...

Plastic?

He lifted the lid off and leaned it against the wall. The dark surface was completely even and smooth.

Plastic?

Why would they keep something like that in a crate? And the stuff seemed as if it was a part of the crate itself. It stretched from one edge to the other without any gaps, it looked as if it was moulded into the wooden planks. So smooth.

He put his palm on the surface. It was warm compared to the temperature of the room.

He moved the source of light nearer and whatever it was acquired a yellowy glow around the edges while remaining dark in the middle. Wasn't there something in there, something long? He moved the torch even closer but he still could not make anything out. He only managed to see that the material was not as smooth as he had first thought. Now he could see the inner composition of the mass, full of densely intertwined veins, which somehow kept escaping the light.

What if he turned the crate over and tipped out the contents? He pushed against the side and after a lot of effort the crate started to lift off the floor. He turned it almost completely over but the strange thing showed no sign of detaching itself from the wood. Alfonz performed the task with the determination of somebody used to working in mountain conditions. He has found a task he has to complete before the winter snow and cold sets in, when nothing else can be done except to sit inside by a burning stove. The plan in his head was growing bigger and more complex by the minute. He would turn the crate upside down, get some tools, pull the nails out of the wood, then bang on it here and there until... and then he stopped.

The house belonged to Max and he was just a guest. He remembered how he had feared that Max would leave him out! He had seen him conferring with Samo and he had known immediately that they were discussing holidays. Then Max spoke to Raf (just think!) and finally to him. Alfonz looked at him as if Max was an approaching angel and Alfonz was sure he would ask him something silly and not what he so much wanted to be asked. Even after he had heard the question, Alfonz hesitated. Not because he needed to think but because he was not sure he had heard right.

And there he was on his first evening - only hours after arrival - messing around with somebody else's things, planning how to break and damage them.

He sighed with shame, looked around himself - darkness - and slowly released the crate into its previous position. Just before it touched the floor the over-burdened fingers let go, the crate slid and hit the floor so that clouds of dust came up at the sides looking like the steam from a locomotive which is just about to set off. The noise it made seemed so loud that he expected to see his friends rushing in, but nobody came.

Again he kneeled next to the monolith’s surface and put both hands on it. Warmth. He could not get rid of the memory of walking to school in the snow in the winter. The darkness surrounding him just like in that cellar. Only his fingers were in a warm place, like in the bed which he had had to leave at half past five in order to get to school on time.

What was he going to do after the holidays? His mother most definitely would not let him go to university. She already viewed him as no better then his father who spent his days just wandering around the place. He was just another parasite, wasting his time at school. He was the youngest son, there were three others above him - not counting the invalid brother - and they had let him stay on at school just to get him out of the way. But subsequently all his older brothers had left for the city one after another and each one of them had later sent a letter saying he was not coming back, restaurant or no restaurant. One of them then got killed by an electric cable after he had jumped off a train before it reached the platform.

Mother had probably already read the note he had left on the kitchen table written on a sheet of paper torn out of one of his notebooks. He had written in pencil that he was going to the seaside for a week and that he would definitely return. He promised to come back. He underlined the last sentence with such ferocity that the pencil end broke and he finished the line with just the leftovers of the graphite embedded in the wood.

Alfonz sighed and returned his attention to the crate. He had a feeling that he was trying to immerse his hand in water which was so thick that he could not break the surface. That shadow in the middle, the denser bit or... He strained his eyes... To no avail.