Mansarda
by Danilo Kiš
Translated by John K. Cox
Eurydice
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 portals 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 fall plums dropped onto the path from a shadowy tree whose branches were jutting 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 depressed: these wild fall plums had contracted their vocal cords, like alum. I heard only the pits, with which they allayed 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, but the ones who hadn't had time to get out of the way remained right there, as if petrified.
Then a man in a sheepskin coat stopped his car all of a sudden.
"Strange," he said, but I couldn't see to whom he addressed these words. I don't think there was anyone in the vehicle, because the light wasn't on.
Then the man in the sheepskin squatted next to the 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 on the headlights.
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; 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 side, 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 an ad in the newspaper, that I'd be able to make a witness' statement and give the medallion back to the dog's owner but I was not able to find such an ad anywhere.
Therefore I took the medallion to a goldsmith one day, after I had 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 gloomy presentiment grew in me, a dread of their howling.
Nonetheless I said one evening, to my own surprise, "I am afraid of trains."
"You aren't afraid of anything," she said. "You don't need to be scared."
"I am 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 should not have said that. You should not have permitted me to say it."
"What?" she asked.
"That thing about the trains and the dogs. I should not have verbalized that. If I hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't be thinking about it all 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 masculine instinct and some sort of anxiety, agitation, that 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 seeds between their eye-teeth."
"That's the watchman making his rounds."
"No," I said. "Just hold me tight."
As the train thundered past, creating 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 was not 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 expecting 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
—fatherland
—cosmopolitanism
—the issue of the organic exchange of matter and
—the issue of nourishment
—metempsychosis
—life on other planets and
—on the stars
—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 one on the list turns 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…, at the Cape of
Good Hope, etc.
Question: The color of her hair?
Hypotheses: Brown,
blonde, fairy hair, hair like the Lady of the Lake, 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 Wise Ass—wanted to dedicate myself to philosophy, and we had, without much effort, just arrived at this famous ninth problem, when he proposed that we skip that item, since it was pretty vulgar and of no interest to philosophers, and instead dedicate ourselves to astronomy and begin this whole affair with the stars.
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) 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 known about or viewed. We christened one star from the constellation of Orion "Undiscovered Love," and a second one "Billy Wise Ass," and a third star we christened with my name (let's let that stay a little secret), and we named a fourth one 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 cabbalistic number "9."
"Allow me," I said, "to introduce my friend to you: Billy Wise Ass."
"Oh," she remarked. "You must surely be a philosopher."
"No," I said. "He's an astronomer."
"Yes," Billy Wise Ass said, "and he's a—"
"—globetrotter," I interrupted, aiming for his pet peeve. (I've never liked to bare my true nature in public.)
"Oh," she replied and scanned a cloud with her eyes.
"Yes," I said. "I've just returned from the Cape of Good Hope by way of the Côte d'Azur."
"Lucky you!" she said.
"Lucky us?" I asked.
"Lucky us," said Billy Wise Ass.
The autumn of the year 7464 (according to the Byzantine calendar) was foggy and wet, and the foliage turned yellow and dried overnight, so that one morning I was astonished to discover that the branches were as naked as pipes. All of this occurred so unexpectedly!
"So what is your name, actually?" she said the next day. "I assume it's not 'Cape of Good Hope.'"
"Orphée," I said. "Orpheus."
Billy Consummate Liar confirmed it:
"Look here, Magdalena," he said. "Why shouldn't you be called Eurydice? He undoubtedly meant to say that too.... Right, Orpheus?"
"Of course," I said. "That goes without saying. If you have no objection."
"Oh," she said. "How strange you are!"
Then, like a surprise attack:
"And where is your guitar, Orpheus?"
"In the mansarda," I said.
"Which mansarda?" she asked.
"We live there because of its proximity to the stars. You understand. We will change 'Hunger' to ... 'Eurydice.' Do you like that idea?"
"I don't get it," she said.
"In order for one star to bear your name."
"My name is not Magdalena."
"Who's talking about Magdalena? I say 'Eurydice.'"
"Oh," she said. "I don't care: but I would like to see this star."
"Certainly," I said. "We will select a star that is worthy of your name."
