That little blue, wobble-wheeled bike had been salvaged from the scrap heap after some boy in the neighbourhood had outgrown it, and now I pushed it up the steepest streets of our quarter for the matchless feeling of zooming downhill, pedalling to increase my speed and perhaps break my own record, trying to hold on for just a second longer with my eyes closed.
I cruised streets full of ghosts and bleak castles for hours as a lone rider and avenger. Gabrek’s visits ushered in a Copernican revolution; Mother’s obsession with my behaviour disappeared and she was understanding of my absences from home. One place I liked to ride was in the enclosed grounds of the psychiatric hospital which our part of the city is known for. I was able to zip in past the guard, no questions asked, and then cheerfully trundle along under the green of the grand old chestnut trees. Or talk with the patients who were out walking in striped pyjamas, sauntering about with their arms folded behind their backs or waving them in the air in lively debate with inner voices. Many of them were happy to chat, and they came up to me whenever I stopped for a break and daydreamed on a bench or by the goldfish pond. It was here that I heard some very interesting life histories.
One day I even plucked up the courage to approach Zoran and see what he was drawing. Day after day, I found him sitting on the same bench, preoccupied with the paper on his lap as if nothing else existed. He was so tall that I thought he must have been some kind of giant, albeit a little bent from always having to lean down; his grey hair, cut in a somehow feminine way, grew thickly above an almost boyish face; and he had enormous hands, elegant and well-manicured, with long nails on both little fingers. He was a good-natured giant, because he was always smiling and showing his handsome teeth, but with such feeling and ephemeral emotion that I would take a piece of it home every time and shut myself away in my room without a word. I remember clearly the smell of flowers that came from him. The patients at the hospital generally needed to be kept at an arm’s length because hygiene at the hospital probably wasn’t high on the scale of priorities. But Zoran radiated a vernal freshness, sweet and polliniferous.
I remember his drawings even more clearly. Each in its own way showed living labyrinths: scenes of teeming action, dense and compact, full of interlaced movements, collisions, rifts and transformations. They were covered from edge to edge in intricate patterns, calligraphic tendrils and arabesques which intersected and merged, plunging into one another, vanishing into depths and forming bizarre figures here and there with unbelievable, enchanting colour combinations. There wasn’t a single empty spot. It was impossible to recognise anything from the earthly world from up close. But when I moved back a little, without realising what they were about, I felt a childlike sense of bliss–at the absolute tranquillity they emanated. Even today I wouldn’t be able to judge the artistic worth of those drawings, but one thing is for sure: neither before nor since have I seen anything more beautiful.
He’d once been a promising young nuclear physicist, he willingly told me, a university dux with offers of a career abroad, but he kept putting it off for the sake of a girl; he burned with love and waited impatiently for her to decide. Until one day she gave him a simple, dry No. And no question he could ask explained where it had all disappeared to so abruptly: all the warmth, the fusion of their souls, the moments of inconceivable tenderness… How could it be that he was suddenly deprived of all that mattered to him? Forget about physics–all he wanted was her and to devote his whole being to her happiness. For days he called and beseeched her, promising any sacrifice and even threatening to kill himself, but that only strengthened her resolve and added to her annoyance.
I’ve reconstructed the way he described things, but I remember the end of the story word by word. She agreed to another date, under her conditions, at the local football grounds. She met him in the middle of the pitch and said: There, exactly where you’re standing, I’ve fucked half the junior team. I had such earth-shaking orgasms that I thought my brain would explode, if you have even the slightest idea what I’m talking about. Have you got the point now? Is it enough for you to leave me in peace?
It was. He turned and went; he didn’t know where to, or how much time passed after that. The next thing he remembered was the hospital. He had only positive things to say about it: everyone was friendly, the food was fine, his parents often visited him, and they brought him all the paper and drawing supplies he wanted. It was only here that he felt the need to draw, and he didn’t stop, from morning till lights-out. But when we returned a year after moving to Gabrek’s, there was no trace of Zoran and I never heard of him again.
I wouldn’t know what to single out from that year. I didn’t make friends with anyone at the new school. There was nothing of interest at home; Mother temporarily overcame her hysterics, and overall she suddenly seemed to have got it all together. She got along fantastically with Gabrek, or at least that’s how it looked; I don’t remember a single quarrel, or one of them even raising their voice. An exceptional peace reigned in the flat, all the more seeing as Gabrek didn’t allow television or radio. I didn’t miss any programmes in particular, but his ban condensed the silence into something morbid. He only consumed the external world as printed on paper and spent most of his time reading the newspaper in the armchair. Apart from the rustling of the pages, you could hear him clucking with his tongue, like a clock emphasising significant seconds to the rhythm of its own inspiration; originally the clucks must have been substitute for a toothbrush, but over time they grew into a means of expression with a broad range of applications, from approval and surprise to disgust at what he had just read. He was mild-mannered, almost always in a good mood and happy to help Mother, but as soon as she left him in peace he would grab a newspaper and be consumed by it, and all that was to be heard were his clucking noises. The day Mother told me–without explanation–that we were packing our things, he only raised his gaze when the boxes had piled up in the hall.
But there was something of a homme fatal about him because the next year Mother announced we were moving back to Gabrek’s and shrugged her shoulders at all my questions. The first move had been in the summer time. Now it was midterm and winter, which caused certain complications and understandably provoked comments from classmates and the neighbours, who were even gladder when we returned, in exactly the same way as before, after less than a month. The good thing was that Gabrek never showed up again.
In the meantime, the house had gone to the dogs. We found it in a sorry state: the walls were green from moisture and a lasting chill had sunk in; it was full of holes, dead flies, mouse droppings and unimaginable smells as if to show us how much it had appreciated our care of it (or perhaps the totality of our existence as seen from inside). Mother actually cared very much for cleanliness and order; once, late at night, I found her in the bathroom trying to scrub something out from between the tiles with a toothbrush and grinding her teeth so fiercely that I returned to bed in fear. From early childhood I carried a feeling of guilt around with me because of my alleged slovenliness, which in my mother’s eyes was a harbinger of delinquency, a path to certain ruin and failure. In fact, the fear of irritating her actually made me develop a pedantry bordering on the pathological, an intolerance of what people like to call creative disorder, everything unfinished and abandoned which was up in the air, including stray embryonic ideas; in other words, I had a precocious obsession with order worthy of a born bookkeeper. After that second outing, however, things stayed in their boxes for a long time, perhaps in anticipation of another journey in the opposite direction, or more likely because of the utter futility of any efforts to keep them in their right place.
The house weighed heavily on our minds. Mother heroically resisted its collapse, first by herself and later with my help, but this didn’t bring about any lasting solution. The house, like our livelihood, rested on fragile foundations. Everything else; the cracks, the leaks and the never-mentioned but credible concern that the roof could come down on our heads in both a physical and a figurative sense, were the inevitable consequence. He, whose name wasn’t to be mentioned (and his heavenly forefather, when we’re talking about the collective structure of things) built it quickly, without a building permit, convinced of his inborn talent for architecture; plus the workers had syphoned off some of the material for more profitable purposes, my mother claimed. For lack of documentation, the house
