The Son Read online

  The Son

  Andrej Nikolaidis

  Translated from the Montenegrin by Will Firth

  Istros Books

  Istros Books

  London, UK

  www.istrosbooks.com

  Copyright © 2013 Andrej Nikolaidis

  Translation © 2013 Will Firth

  Artwork & Design@Milos Miljkovich, 2013

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2013 by Istros Books

  Via the Dzanc Books rEprint Series

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-937854-78-2

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  O how silent was the house when Father passed into the darkness.

  - Georg Trakl, Dream and Derangement

  Everyone, whatever he is and quite irrespective of what he does, is repeatedly thrown back upon his own resources, like a nightmare forced to rely on itself.

  - Thomas Bernhard, The Cellar

  I

  Everything would have been different if I’d been able to control my repulsion, I realised.

  The sun was still visible through the lowered blinds. It had lost all its force and now, unable to burn, it disappeared behind the green of the olive groves which extended all the way to the pebbly beach of Valdanos and on as far as Kruče and Utjeha; bays sardined with bathers determined to absorb every last carcinogenic ray before going back to their accommodation. There they would douse their burnt skin with imitations of expensive perfumes, don their most revealing attire and dash off to discos and terraces with turbofolk music, full of confidence that tonight they would go down on another body with third-degree burns; possessing and then forgetting another human being almost identical to themselves.

  At first I’d resolved to stay in bed a bit longer, but I had to get up because the stench of sweat in the room was unbearable. The room is located on the western side of the house, and it’s as hot as a foundry in there in the afternoons. The sun beats against the walls for hours and hours. Even when the bugger goes down, the walls still radiate the heat. They bombard me with it all night long. Ever since we moved into the house and I first lay in that bed, I’ve sweated. I wake at three in the morning and have to get out of bed because the pillow and the sheet are drenched with perspiration and start to stink. What’s more, they stink dreadfully – it’s simply unbearable. My own body drives me out of bed.

  Making that room the bedroom was a catastrophic decision. We carried in the bed, wardrobe and bookshelves, and sealed the unhappy fate of our marriage, although we wouldn’t realise it until later. Nothing could survive the night in that room, certainly nothing as fragile and bloodless as our marriage.

  For two years I sweated, woke horrified by the reek of my own body and drank coffee on the balcony for hours. Shortly before dawn, I would fall asleep again briefly on the couch in the living room. Worn out by insomnia and fatigue, I would go in and cuddle her when she woke. For two years I tried to grasp what was amiss and why everything seemed to go wrong for us. I strained my mind as best I could, exhausted by insomnia and the dissatisfaction which filled the house. For two years I wasn’t even able to think. And then it was all over. She left. ‘I can’t take this anymore’, she yelled, and was gone.

  That same instant I threw myself onto the bed, where even just the night before we’d said ‘I love you’ to each other in our ritual of hypocrisy. I was asleep before I hit the pillow. I woke bathed in sweat, as usual. She really has gone – that was the first thing I thought when I opened my eyes. She wasn’t there anymore, but the bed still stank of me.

  I got up and almost fled from the bed. I closed the door behind me, determined that nothing would ever leave that room again. I plodded to the kitchen and put on some water for coffee. Then I ran back to the room and locked the door twice just to be sure.

  I thought it would be good to read something, I said to myself. It really was high time. For two whole years I hadn’t read anything except the crime column in the newspaper. The only things which still interested me were crime news and books about serial killers. It was as though only overt eruptions of evil could jolt me out of my indifference. I no longer had the energy for the hermeneutics of evil. That was behind me now. I could no longer stand searching for evil in the everyday actions of so-called ‘ordinary people’. Instead, I chose vulgar manifestations of evil. If a man killed thirty people and buried them under his house, that still had a wow factor for me. But I’d lost the strength to deal with the everyday animosities, suppressed desires and cheap tricks of the people I met: those who treated me as if I was blind, convinced that they’ve duped me into believing their good intentions and made a total fool of me, while I simply looked through them as if they didn’t exist.

  He Offered Himself for Dinner, the paper wrote that morning. The crime column reported on the cheerful story of Armin Meiwes, a cannibal from Germany, who had joined an online cannibal community. Humans are sociable beings: they come together when they’re born, they flock together when they go off to do their military service and learn to kill other human beings, they come together to mate and to marry, and ultimately they also congregate when they want to eat one another. Meiwes had found a place where kindred souls gathered. He wanted to eat someone and confided this to his friends from the cannibal community. When he placed an announcement in the forum, replies came in from 400 people who wanted to be eaten. And so he chose one of them. It seems this fellow had particular demands: he requested that he and his benefactor celebrate a ‘last supper’ together and eat his penis before he be killed. Obliging Meiwes wanted to fulfil his wish, but after their initial enthusiasm they agreed that the meal was inedible. The paper then went on to explain how the ‘volunteer’ then felt sick and started saying the Lord’s Prayer. Meiwes, whom doctors established to be quite normal, stated that he skipped the prayer because ‘he couldn’t decide who his father was – God or the Devil – so he didn’t know whom he should be praying to’. In any case, Meiwes killed the fellow after the prayer, later ate him and filmed the whole business.

  I went to the bookshelf and took down Eliot’s The Waste Land, which a friend had given us in our first summer in the house. The November of that year was rainy and condemned us to stay at home since the continuous deluges made our walks through the olive grove impossible. That month we tried to achieve the idyll from B-movies, sitting in armchairs in our living room with a fire crackling in our fireplace. We sat and read Eliot. I read aloud and she listened. I loved her then, like I always loved her. Then I couldn’t take it anymore, like I’d never been able to take it anymore. But I decided to go on after all, like I always decide I should go on. Things never fail because of me, nor do they go off well thanks to me. They always happen with me as a bystander. I just adapt to them.

  As a child I imagined life as an enormous desert which I had to walk through while trying not to disturb a thing or to leave any trace. Not one footprint was to remain in the sand after I was gone, not one flake of ash from the fire I laid, not one bone of an animal I killed to eat, not one scrap of waste from the caravan I met, not one tree at the oasis whose bark I carved my initials in, not one woman in a village with a child of mine by her side. I was just passing through, and I took care that no-one noticed and was able to say: he was here. That’s how I thought back then, and that’s how I still think today. But that’s not what I did. I got married. I took a wife but continued travelling without a trace. In the end she declared ‘I can’t take this anymore!’ and left. I could have said that too, but I didn’t – she said it because she was stronger than me.

  April is the cruellest month, according to Eliot. But he never lived on the Montenegrin riviera, and his fellow citizens didn’t rake in wealth by renting out rooms. He never saw tourists arriving in his peaceful town like hordes of Huns and turning it into a giant, barbarian amusement park, and he never felt how it feels when your habitat shrinks to the boundaries of your courtyard, because simply leaving the house means having to forge your way through a seething mass of foreign bodies, all of whom are ugly, loud and possessed by the pursuit of pleasure. It is this that always forces me to rush back home in panic, constantly vigilant for the omnipresent, lurking danger: I return to the world of my own property, separated by a tall fence from the rest of the world which has been occupied by unknown and terrible people. August is the cruellest month, I say.

  I think it was Al-Ghazali who wrote that heaven is surrounded by suffering, whereas hell is surrounded by pleasures. Seen from up on the forested hill where my house is, the town I live in looks like hell in the summertime. Tourism is a trade in pleasure, and people in a tourist town are indeed surrounded by pleasures. So Al-Ghazali was right: I am in hell because I am surrounded by pleasures. Sartre is also right when he says hell is the others. Their pleasure is my hell.

  The phone rang. A friend was calling to tell me that a DVD edition of the film Cannibal Holocaust had just arrived from America.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked him.

  ‘A film about an expedition of film-makers, who come across a tribe of cannibals in the Amazon jungle,’ he said.

  ‘Sounds good for starters. What happens after that?’

  ‘Nothing much – the rest of the film is about the cannibals eating them. The distributors I got it from are called Grindhouse and specialise in the obscure
st, most shocking and most repulsive films of all time,’ he explained, not without enthusiasm. ‘Imagine what I’ve just seen in their catalogue: there’s a whole range of films where people are put to the most terrible of tortures, raped, slashed open, quartered and eaten. There are also titles where it says No animals suffered in the making of this film. Get that?’ he yelled into the receiver.

  ‘I get it,’ I answered through my teeth.

  ‘They’re worried that some lovers of cannibalism, who watch movies of people being disembowelled, might feel squeamish about violence towards animals,’ he bellowed.

  ‘I’m afraid I get it,’ I said.

  I realised I wouldn’t be able to read any more after that. There’s always something at the last instant which prevents me from reading. For reading and any kind of mental exertion I need leisure. If I never felt bored, I’d never write anything. And I was still bored now, as usual, but for some time I’d been unable to think why I should read or write at all and why it was important to ‘develop my mind’. I gave up all thought of reading and turned on the computer.

  I couldn’t get onto the internet. The dial-up connection kept tossing me offline. The telephone exchange was overloaded due to the thousands of Kosovo-born tourists who were probably sending messages to their families in Western Europe. In the summertime, these Gastarbeiters like to show off the pittance they’ve earned by insisting on these two weeks of annual holiday which bring them only frustration: no matter how much they’ve strutted like peacocks and seduced young girls from Pec with their gold chains and ten-year-old Mercedes, the stench of the toilets they’ve cleaned and will go back to clean in Munich, Stockholm or Graz still sticks in their nostrils. Now they were back from the beach and frantically phoning and sending mails, driven by the need to communicate, despite being illiterates for whom every spoken word induced suffering like that of giving birth.

  I was livid with contempt and antipathy, an abhorrence which flooded over me as completely and utterly as they say saints are suffused with love. I needed to see open space: the soothing emptiness of the sea; a blue unpolluted by people. I rushed out onto the balcony.

  The first shades of night were falling. The sun was setting once more behind my great-uncle’s olive grove, which is what we called the hill laden with rows of overgrown olive trees. In fact, it was fifty hectares of viper- and boar-infested scrub blocking our view of the sea. My father claimed he had once seen ‘something otherworldly’ come down to land behind the hill. I never managed to convince him that it was just the sun. Evening after evening, we sat on the terrace waiting for darkness to fall. We watched in silence as the sun slowly disappeared behind the silhouette of the hill, which had always stood between me and the world. When the light was gone, my father would get up, state resolutely, ‘No way, that wasn’t the sun!’ and disappear into the house. From then on, the only sign of his existence would be strains of Bach which escaped from the dark of the bedroom, where he lay paralysed by the depression which had abused him for two decades.

  That evening the hill caught on fire. Instead of feeling a breeze from the sea, I was hit in the face by the heat of the burning forest. The fire would erase all my father’s labours once more, I thought. After each blaze, the police scoured the terrain searching for evidence which would lead them to the culprit. Needless to say, they never found anything: not a single piece of broken glass or a match, let alone a trace of the firebug. ‘They’ll never find out who set fire to our hill, I tell you. How can they when the fire comes from another world?’ my father repeated.

  When the hill burned the first time, he saw it as a sign of God: ‘My whole life had passed by without me even taking a proper look at the olive grove my uncle left me. Now there’s no olive grove left – just my obligation to the land,’ my father spoke with the fatalism so typical of this crazy, blighted family.

  He built a fence around the entire hill. He worked his way through the charred forest step by step, breaking stones and driving hawthorn-wood stakes into the rock, as if into the heart of a vampire. Then he tied barbed wire to the stakes, which tore into the flesh of his hands. For months he came home black from head to toe like a coal miner who had just emerged from the deepest pit. And that’s what he was: a miner. He delved into the heart of his memories. He wasn’t clearing the charcoaled forest but digging at what was inside him, breaking the boulder which oppressed him, shovelling away the scree which had buried him alive. He came home all wet and sooty for months, until one day he announced that his work was done. The property was fenced in and cleared. He had built new dry stone walls and planted olive saplings. He took me and my mother onto the terrace and showed us my great-uncle’s olive grove for the umpteenth time. ‘I’ve resurrected it from the flames,’ my father pronounced.

  When the hill burned the second time, he installed a new fence and planted the olive trees again. As if that was not enough work, he also built a barn. Then he brought in goats from Austria. His diligence went so far that he even minded them. That year he was a goatherd. During the day he would roam over the hill with the goats; in the early evening he would bring them back to the barn for the night. ‘The pasture is excellent this year –,’ he said, ‘fresh growth is coming up from the scorched earth, and so the goats are eating the best food. Now they’re fenced in, safe from the jackals, and have a nice dry place to sleep: like a five-star hotel,’ he was fond of adding.

  My mother thought she knew the root of my father’s devotion to the goats. She claimed to remember from my grandmother’s stories that my great-uncle had tuberculosis. ‘He died of it in the end, too, but he owed the last years of his life to the goats,’ my mother said. ‘A goatkeeper came from Šestani and brought him milk. He lived on even after the doctors had written him off, thanks to that milk. He had no wife or children, only your grandmother – the wife of his deceased brother, your father, and those goats up in Šestani. He lived with your grandmother and your father, and the goats helped him survive,’ my mother told me.

  Born in the coastal range of Crmnica, my great-uncle had left for America in his youth. He fled his impoverished village for New York, only to go hungry in the big city for the next three years. He slept in neglected warehouses and stole vegetables from the markets to feed himself. Occasionally he would kill a stray dog, and then he thanked the Lord for the skills with knife and stick he had learnt hunting birds on Lake Skadar. ‘After the first week I knew I’d succeed. I knew I’d survive,’ he later told his brother’s wife and her son. ‘I eked out a lonely living in the middle of New York as if I was up in the wilds of Montenegro.’ The boy stared, riveted, while he spoke about the dog skin he had made shoes from. The boy had never seen his own father, but he imagined he must have looked like this uncle with the short, grizzled moustache who now came into their kitchen in shoes of strong-smelling leather (maybe even dog-leather?), hugged his mother and him, slipped some money for sweets into his pocket like uncles do, and in the evening told them tales of his adventures. What an uncle, what a man!

  He made it good in America but died of a broken heart, my grandmother told my father, who later told me: ‘He never married and therefore died unhappy. “Everything I’ve done and all the roads I’ve travelled have been in vain because I’m dying without a son”, he said before he died.’ My mother, while she was alive, maintained he would have lived longer if he’d stayed in America: ‘But he came back, saw your father and fretted for the son he’d never had – that’s what killed him in the end.’

  He slaved away all his life, only to die in misery. But he left all his worldly goods to his sister-in-law. That saved her from the penury she faced after her husband’s death and would have had to raise her child in. ‘All my young years I ate the fruits of my uncle’s labour; I fed on his sweat and suffering,’ my father used to say.

  The man from Crmnica laboured, suffered and died. That’s the whole story about each and every one of us: the complete biography of the human race. He was buried fifty years ago, and what’s left of him is going up in flames tonight.

  Now it’s all over, I thought as I watched the flames rising into the night sky. The hill was burning for the third time in ten years. The fire would be my father’s final defeat. He no longer had the strength to raise the property from the ashes again. After my mother died, the enforced loneliness he was ill-prepared for exacerbated his depression. He hardly ever left the house anymore. He would just sit in the darkened living room all day. I asked myself what he was thinking about, but in fact I didn’t really care. I just hoped he was thinking and that at least his thoughts might manage to break through the tall, smooth walls of depression which surrounded him.