The Question of Bruno (3 page)

We walked into the sonorous chill of a large stone-walled hall. There was a reception desk, but nobody behind it, and a smiling Tito-picture over the numbered cubbyhole shelf. Then we walked through a long tunnel and then through a low door, so everyone but me had to bow their heads, then we were in a cubicle-like windowless room (“This used to be a nun cell,” Uncle Julius whispered), then we entered the eatery (they had to bend their knees and bow their heads, as if genuflecting, again) with long wooden tables and, on them, two parallel rows of plates and utensils. We sat there waiting for the waiter. There was a Popsicle-yellow lizard, as big as a new pencil, on
the stone wall behind Uncle Julius’s back. It looked at us with an unblinking marble eye, apparently perplexed, and then it scurried upward, toward an obscure window.

This was what Uncle Julius told us:

“When I was a young student in Moscow, in the thirties, I saw the oldest man in the world. I was in a biology class, it was in a gigantic amphitheater, hundreds of rows, thousands of students. They brought in an old man who couldn’t walk, so two comrades carried him and he had his arms over their shoulders. His feet were dangling between them, but he was all curled up like a baby. They said he was a hundred and fifty-eight years old and from somewhere in the Caucasus. They put him sideways on the desk and he started crying like a baby, so they gave him a stuffed toy—a cat, I think, but I can’t be certain, because I was sitting all the way up in one of the last aisles. I was looking at him as if through the wrong side of a telescope. And the teacher told us that the old man cried all the time, ate only liquid foods, and couldn’t bear being separated from his favorite toy. The teacher said that he slept a lot, didn’t know his name and had no memories. He could say only a couple of words, like water, poo-poo and such. I figured out then that life is a circle, you get back right where you started if you get to be a hundred and fifty-eight years old. It’s like a dog chasing its own tail, all is for naught. We live and live, and in the end we’re just like this boy [he pointed at me], knowing nothing, remembering nothing. You might as well stop living now, my son. You might just as well stop, for nothing will change.”

When I woke up, after a night of unsettling dreams, the suitcases were agape and my parents were packing them with wrinkled underwear and shirts. Uncle Julius came up with a jar of honey as big as my head and gave it to my father. He looked at the photo of Mljet and then put the tip of his finger at the point in the upper-right corner, near the twin lakes, which looked like gazing eyes. “We are here,” he said.

The sun had not risen yet from behind the hill, so there were no shadows and everything looked muffled, as if under a sheet of fine gauze. We walked down the narrow road and the asphalt was cold and moist. We passed a man carrying a cluster of dead fish, with the hooks in their carmine gills. He said: “Good morning!” and smiled.

We waited at the pier. A shabby boat, with paint falling off and
Pirate
written in pale letters on the prow, was heading, coughing, toward the open sea. A man with an anchor tattooed on his right arm was standing at the rudder. He had a torn red-and-black flannel shirt, black soccer shorts, and no shoes—his feet were bloated and filthy. He was looking straight ahead toward the ferry that was coming into the harbor. The ferry slowed down to the point of hesitant floating, and then it dropped down its entrance door, like a castle bridge, with a harsh peal. It was a different ship than the ship we had come
on, but the same man with the hobbling-boat shirt said: “Welcome!” again, and smiled, as if recognizing us.

We passed the same islands. They were like heavy, moulded loaves of bread, dropped behind a gigantic ship. On one of the islands, and we passed it close by, there was a herd of goats. They looked at us mildly confounded, and then, one by one, lost interest and returned to grazing. A man with a camera, probably a German tourist, took a picture of the goats, and then gave the camera to his speckle-faced, blue-eyed son. The boy pointed the camera toward the sun, but the man jokingly admonished him, turning him, and the camera, toward us, while we grinned at him, helpless.

It took us only four hours to get home from the coast and I slept the whole time, oblivious to the heat, until we reached Sarajevo. When we got home, the shriveled plants and flowers were in the midst of the setting-sun orange spill. All the plants had withered, because the neighbor who was supposed to water them died of a sudden heart attack. The cat, having not been fed for more than a week, was emaciated and nearly mad with hunger. I would call her, but she wouldn’t come to me; she would just look at me with irreversible hatred.

A
lphonse Kauders is the creator of
The Forestry Bibliography, 1900–1948
, published by the Engineers and Technicians Association, in Zagreb, 1949. This is a special bibliography related to forestry. The material is classified into seventy-three groups and encompasses 8,800 articles and theses. Bibliographical units are not numbered. The creator of
The Forestry Bibliography
was the first to catalog the entire forest matter in a single piece of work. The work has been viewed as influential.

    Alphonse Kauders had a dog by the name of Rex, whose whelp, in the course of time, he gave to Josip B. Tito.

    Alphonse Kauders had a mysterious prostate illness and, in the course of time, he said: “Strange are the ways of urine.”

    Alphonse Kauders said to Rosa Luxemburg: “Let me penetrate a little bit, just a bit, I’ll be careful.”

    Alphonse Kauders said: “And what if I am still here.”

    Alphonse Kauders was the only son of his father, a teacher. He was locked up in a lunatic asylum, having attempted to molest seven seven-year-old girls at the same time. Father, a teacher.

    Alphonse Kauders said to Dr. Joseph Goebbels: “Writing is a useless endeavor. It is as though we sign every molecule of
gas, say, of air, which—as we all know—cannot be seen. Yet, signed gas, or air, is easier to inhale.”

Dr. Joseph Goebbels said: “Well, listen, that differs from a gas to a gas.”

    Alphonse Kauders was the owner of the revolver used to assassinate King Alexander.

    One of Alphonse Kauders’s seven wives had a tumor as big as a three-year-old child.

    Alphonse Kauders said: “People are so ugly that they should be liberated from the obligation to have photos in their identity cards. Or, at least, in their Party cards.”

    Alphonse Kauders desired, passionately, to create a bibliography of pornographic literature. He held in his head 3,700 pornographic books. Plus magazines.

    Richard Sorge, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They sounded like sobs, sheer heartrending sorrow, which, resembling waves, emerged from the depths of one’s soul, and, then, broke down, someplace high, high above.”

    Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, had to crawl on all fours for seven days, for his penis had been stung by seventy-seven bees.

    Alphonse Kauders owned complete lists of highly promiscuous women in Moscow, Berlin, Marseilles, Belgrade, and Munich.

    
Alphonse Kauders was a Virgin in his horoscope. And in his horoscope only.

    Alphonse Kauders never, never wore or carried a watch.

    There are records suggesting that the five-year-old Alphonse Kauders amazed his mother by making “systematic order” in the house pantry.

    Alphonse Kauders said to Adolf Hitler, in Munich, as they were guzzling down their seventh mug of beer: “God, mine is always hard when it is needed. And it is always needed.”

    Alphonse Kauders:

a) hated forests

b) loved to watch fires

These proclivities were happily united in his notorious obsession with forest fires, which he would watch, with great pleasure, whenever he had a chance.

    Josip B. Tito, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They sounded like all the sirens of Moscow on May 1, the International Labor Day.”

    Alphonse Kauders impregnated Eva Braun, and she, in the course of time, delivered a child. But after Adolf Hitler began establishing new order and discipline and seducing Eva Braun, she, intoxicated by the Führer’s virility, sent the child to a concentration camp, forcing herself to believe it was only for the summer.

    
Alphonse Kauders hated horses. Oh, how Alphonse Kauders hated horses.

    Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, truly believed that man created himself in the process of history.

    Alphonse Kauders stood behind Gavrilo Princip, whispering—as urine was streaming down Gavrilo’s thigh, as Gavrilo’s sweating hand, holding a weighty revolver, was trembling in his pocket—Alphonse Kauders whispered: “Shoot, brother, what kind of a Serb are you?”

    Alphonse Kauders described his relationship with Rex: “We, living in fear, hate each other.”

    There are records that Alphonse Kauders spent some years in a juvenile delinquents’ home, having set seven forest fires in a single week.

    Alphonse Kauders said: “I hate people, almost as much as horses, because there are always too many of them around, and because they kill bees, and because they fart and stink, and because they always come up with something, and it is the worst when they come up with irksome revolutions.”

    Alphonse Kauders wrote to Richard Sorge: “I cannot speak. Things around me do not speak. Still, dead, like rocks in a stream, they do not move, they have no meaning, they are just barely present. I stare at them, I beg them to tell me something, anything, to make me name them. I beg them to exist—they only buzz in the darkness, like a radio without a program, like an empty city, they want to say nothing. Nothing. I cannot
stand the pressure of silence, even sounds are motionless. I cannot speak, words mean nothing to me. At times, my Rex knows more than I do. Much more. God bless him, he is silent.”

    Alphonse Kauders knew by heart the first fifty pages of the Berlin phone book.

    Alphonse Kauders was the first to tell Joseph
V.
Stalin: “No!”

Stalin asked him: “Do you have a watch, Comrade Kauders?” and Alphonse Kauders said: “No!”

    Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, told the following: “In our party, there are two main factions: the Maniacs and the Killers. The Maniacs are losing their minds, the Killers are killing. Naturally, in neither of these two factions is there any women. Women are gathered in the faction called the Women. Chiefly, they serve as an excuse for bloody fights between the Maniacs and the Killers. The Maniacs are the better soccer team, but the Killers can do wonders with knives, like nobody else in this modern world of ours.”

    Alphonse Kauders had gonorrhea seven times and syphilis only once.

    Alphonse Kauders does not exist in the
Encyclopedia of the USSR.
Then again, he does not exist in the
Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia.

    Alphonse Kauders said: “I am myself, everything else is stories.”

    
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They were akin to the wail of an everlastingly solitary siren, sorrow in the purest of forms.”

    One of the seven wives of Alphonse Kauders had a short leg. Then again, the other leg was long. The arms were, more or less, of the same length.

    In the Archives of the USSR, there is a manuscript which is believed to have originated from Alphonse Kauders:

“1) shoot under the tongue (?);

2) symbolism (?); death on the ground (?); in the forest (??); by an anthill (?); by a beehive;

3) take only one bullet;

4) the sentence: I shall be reborn if this bullet fails, and I hope it won’t;

5) lie down, so all the blood flows into the head;

6) burn all manuscripts => possibility of someone thinking they were worth something;

7) invent some love (?);

8) the sentence: I blame nobody, especially not Her (?);

9) tidy up the room;

10) write to Stalin: Koba, why did you need my death?

11) take a bottle of water with me;

12) avoid talking until the certain date.”

    One of Alphonse Kauders’s seven best men was Richard Sorge.

    Alphonse Kauders regularly subscribed to all the pornographic magazines of Europe.

    
Alphonse Kauders removed his own appendix in Siberia, and he probably would have died, had he not been transferred to the camp hospital at the very last moment. And that was only because he had informed on a bandit in the bed next to his for secretly praying at night.

    Alphonse Kauders said to Eva Braun: “Money isn’t everything. There is some gold too.”

    Alphonse Kauders was a fanatic beekeeper. In the course of his life, he led fierce and merciless battles against parasitic lice that ruthlessly exploit bees, and are known as “varoa.”

    Alphonse Kauders said: “The most beautiful fire (not being a forest one) I have ever seen, was when the Reichstag was ablaze.”

    The very idea of creating Alphonse Kauders occurred for the first time to his (future) mother. She said to the (future) father of Alphonse Kauders: “Let’s make passionate love and create Alphonse Kauders.”

    Father said: “All right. But let’s watch some, you know, pictures.”

    Alphonse Kauders was a member of seven libraries, of seven apicultural societies, of seven communist parties and of a national-socialist one.

    Alphonse Kauders told the following: “In elementary school, I attracted attention by stuffing my fist into my mouth. Girls from other classes would rush in droves to see me stuff my fist into my mouth. My father, a teacher, glowed
with a bliss, seeing all those girls swarming around me. Once, a girl that I wished to make love to approached me. And I was so excited that I tried to shove both of my fists into my mouth. I sacrificed my two front teeth for my passion. Ever since I have been noticed for my insanity. This strange event probably determined the course of my life. Ever since I haven’t talked.”