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A HOUSE IN SALONICA
That May night in Bitola I
leapt up in bed as if scalded. In my nightmare, my hair standing on end to
touch the ceiling, my eyes bulging, I stared at the pregnant darkness from
which it seemed to me at any moment the white silhouette of the Archangel
Gabriel would leap out to scrabble around in my breast with his sharp
sword.
"Charon! Charon!" I shouted, or so I
thought, my ears straining, my heart thumping wildly above the uprooted
floorboards crawling with distorted cockroaches and the stench of threat.
"Why are you in such a hurry? Are there so few people left? Char-o-o-on!"
An owl hooted from the depths of the
darkness. It snorted like a man who’d fallen asleep on the balcony on a
summer night, and got me out of bed. I ran from the house, completely
disoriented. Outside in the fresh air I shivered and came to earth in the
yard. I stood half clothed beside the low concrete wall, sweating to high
heaven; the stars broke out in a rash of fear and lust.
The house next door drowsed in dim
uncertainty; cats were yowling on the terrace, tearing at something,
foretelling something, like witches on Halloween or some such thing.
"What about a smoke? said a man from over
the wall. I hadn’t seen how he detached himself from the gloom, how he
created himself in front of me. He was tall and thin – that was all I could
see – and held out his hand towards me.
"Abraham?" I said, although I knew it
could only be Abraham here, in his own yard, two or three steps away from
me beyond the wall.
"Want one?" he repeated, and in a couple
of paces stepped over to me as he always used to when he saw that I’d come
back here again, that I was wandering up and down in the yard, my eyes
wandering over the dove-cote or Doncho’s garage. I took one from the open
packet of Marlboros and went through the instinctive motions of the smoker
who’s looking for a lighter, lost in impatience and irritation. Abraham lit
it for me with his Zippo and we both sat on the common wall that separated
our two yards.
"So how are you?" I said, because I had
to say something; silence is never sufficient, it makes enemies of people,
it reveals all the insufficiencies, it fills their souls with doubts and
lack of faith.
"I’m coping," even if he had nothing to
cope with – he was barely into his forties, he could crush a stone with his
bare hands, I was sure.
"And you?" he said.
"I’ve been sleeping badly recently," I
said. "I only have to doze off and apparitions fall on me."
"Stop up the leaks," said Abraham, and he
took a deep draw on his cigarette. "You come once a year, sleep in smelly,
damp disorder, and expect to feel all right. It was different when your
folks were alive, a house has to have folk living in it."
"I know," I said, and it felt as if I
were continuing a conversation started long before, but interrupted by a
wall of dumb time built between the thoughts. My soul trembled like an
aspen, my hands shook, and the sweat dried swiftly as I recalled my
thoughts.
"How are your folks?" I asked, partly
from politeness, but more from a desire to forget the mess I was in myself.
"Not here," said Abraham, briefly, and
his face darkened. "What good are they to me? Bastards. They’ve been living
in Porodin since the winter. I’m free at last."
"And Raphe?"
Raphael was his uncle. He lived next door
to Abraham, and had three houses and a stomach ulcer. He taught physics or
biology in one of the middle schools, or he’d retired, I wasn’t sure.
"Dirty brute," said Abraham, and he stood
up, rising in front of me like a telegraph pole. He waved his arms about,
pointing up threateningly with the index finger of his right hand. "He
found a job for his son before he was qualified, and he still hasn’t thrown
a party for him. He’s the stingiest man in the world. And his wife – heaven
help you! She came from the dirt but makes out she’s the cleanest woman in
the world. The last time I visited them, I intentionally didn’t take off my
shoes, and she gave me such a dirty look that I’m never going to cross
their doorstep again. Damn it, we’re not Turks!"
"And you?"
"What about me?"
"How are you getting on?" I asked calmly,
to soothe the turbulence I saw churning in him, threatening to engulf and
swallow him.
"How am I getting on?" he said, sitting
down next to me. "I’m getting on." He took out his lighter and relit the
cigarette that had gone out in his great excitement and the sudden gestures
of his hands and his soul. "Brute animals," he went on, "they look at you,
they hate you, without any reason, out of sheer stupidity, imbecility:
sometimes I feel like murder!"
I have never liked situations like this.
Suddenly, against your will, you touch something that has nothing to do
with anything you are interested in, like the number of the stars, for
instance, or the infinite harmony of inequalities, the peacock’s cosmic
tail... It seems now I’d touched on something that drove Abraham out of his
mind, I upset his artificial balance and turned him into a living volcano,
erupting a bitter lava of heated words. He was sitting by me, angrily
tapping with both feet on the uneasy earth which, aware of its own lack of
intelligence, wasn’t even trying to object, to give voice to its own
distress and confusion.
"And that brother of yours," he suddenly
yelled, and looked me straight in the face. "It’s a good thing that he’s
moved away from here. Only the devil could give you a man like that as a
neighbor, it’s as if you didn’t have the same mother." He was stammering,
heavy misery pouring out of his mouth and spreading through that May night
that was not prepared for pain. "And those Dunovcis, the Angelovcis! Brute
upon brute! I wouldn’t give them a noseful of snot!" That’s how Abraham was
going on, standing there in flames, raving, as if unaware that conversation
between human beings never ends. "I get a good wage, I smoke Marlboros.
Some people don’t have anything to eat, but I can do what I like, drink
whiskey – the whole of Bitola is mine!"
I didn’t interrupt him. He was speaking,
dark whirlwinds were drowning our poor neighborhood, the very moss lying on
the naked body of the darkness sneezed.
"Only I haven’t got any children," he came out with it, and it stopped him
short, silenced him; he bent his head for the universe to fall on it, the
heavy infiniteness of the pocked sky and unpredictable darkness.
"So what," I said, and I ground out my
cigarette there under the pear tree, where it stood over us like an
apparition and threw vague shadows on the little balcony of my house. Then
I took another and lit it because the first hadn’t been enough to destroy
my taste. I didn’t want a sweet taste in my mouth, it’s an insidious
weakness. Abraham said nothing, he bent his head further – as if he hadn’t
heard me, as if I weren’t worth listening to.
Ten yards away, from the direction of
Doncho’s garage, there was the rhythmic hoot of the invisible owl, and a
couple of bats passing two or three times in front of our eyes confirmed
the hopeless quest for daylight and happiness.
"Find a new wife!" I shouted, as if it
were a matter of changing his shirt or his necktie because of a mismatch of
colors or some such thing.
"I found one!" thundered Abraham, and
with his whole strength flung his cigarette over the wall. Then he stood up
opposite me with his arms folded and his unfocused gaze wandered over the
roofs.
"And?"
"And – nothing again. I put up with her
for a bit, then I threw her out like a bitch."
I stood up and trod a circle round
Abraham while he, with his hands raised as if in prayer, was feeling the
scars that marred that night of no rest. Around us, packed close in
fruitful sleep, the neighboring houses murmured, darkness knocking at their
windows, evil gods at their doors.
"But you’ve no idea how I miss the
first," groaned Abraham, and he put his hands to his head, gripped it and
rocked it from side to side, God, how he pulled it about, twisted it – I
thought he’d uproot it and throw it to the other side of the wall, to the
other side of life. "I miss her, I miss her," he sobbed, he wailed. "I miss
her in the day, I miss her in the night, in the sun and in the shade I miss
her, when I’m shitting, when I’m pissing, summer and winter I miss her, in
my bed, in my bones, in my very marrow I miss her!"
He moaned and sobbed, then he crouched
like a little child, pushing himself into the corner between the wall and
the fence. "If I could see her!" he said, "just see her once!"
"Well, see her," I said. "Who’s stopping
you?"
He said that she’d gone to Salonica, and
banged his head against the wall. "Salonica isn’t a village!" he howled.
"Abraham!" I said, and immediately I was
frightened by the strength of my own voice, that came from deep down in my
throat, and upset the balance of the night.
"I must see her," he insisted, and I
thought my neighbor was going to die, he might have a heart attack or a
stroke. For a whole ten minutes I was talking to him, soothing him,
threatening him, promising him, convincing him and convincing myself.
"Hold your head up, Abraham. Think! What
does a man need in this world? Only a level plain, a mountain and some
vague future. Because if the future’s clear he can see his own death."
"I want to see her," he growled, he
squealed, he howled; bits of his soul flew out of his mouth.
"Alright, alright, you’ll see her, I’ll
help you," I said. I’ve already worked out how." I went to him, took him by
the shoulders and stood him, tall and clumsy, against the wall. "But first
we must go to the Jewish cemetery. You hear me? First to the Jews, and I’ll
tell you about Laki and Spasija, then there’s something we must do, and
then you’ll see, OK? All you have to do is to trust me and to follow me."
Abraham was looking at me, but I didn’t
give him time for any second thoughts, for any doubts; I had decided to
help him, and I knew how. So, I simply seized him by the sweater and
dragged him out through the gate onto the asphalt path.
2
Our suburb is in an odd location. In a
deep depression among these hills. On the lowest is the Turkish and on the
second the Jewish cemetery, and the highest hill is as flat as a tea-tray,
and here you could set a gigantic vase in honor of the god of the heights.
You can see the Pelagonian plain from here, and sense the smell of the
Aegean. When we were kids we used to play football among the Jewish graves,
in winter we skied there on staves from wine-barrels, and we duelled with
sticks cut from the dense green grove that suckled us with clean air and
tranquility.
The asphalt path was deserted. I went
first and Abraham came behind me like a minor nightmare, impossibly tall
and slightly bent – I thought his head touched the roof of the night, and
there was a chance that the slightest excitement might make him jump up and
make a hole in it. It was past midnight: I could tell by the calm, by the
cessation of the whispering of the witches from the corners of the night.
We went through the aspen grove and came out by the stepped wall which
marked the boundary of the graveyard. The wall ran up, following the line
of the hill, and just before it reached the top turned right and went on
like that, almost level, for some hundred meters and then turned right
again, running down the bare body of the hill to its foot, at which we were
now standing, about a hundred meters away. At one time we used to have so
much energy, such a youthful zest for life, that we’d climb up the steps of
the wall, one after the other, and do the whole circuit round the cemetery
in ten minutes.
"Climb up!" I told him, and without
waiting I bent over and clasped my fingers, and Abraham stepped on them
almost automatically – it was an exercise we’d done for years. Then he
stood up on the wall.
"Give me a hand," I said, and when I’d
got up too we jumped down on the other side, and there we were in the
Jewish cemetery.
The moon peeping from the top of the hill
through the pocked sky lit up the ghostly area in front of us, crowded with
hundreds of tombstones overgrown with grass. A thousand destinies jabbered
in the darkness, innumerable unknown former fellow-citizens, gentlemen,
they say, who gave its specific charm and dignity to Broad Street and the
bazaar.
"Today there isn’t a Jew alive in
Bitola," I said, rather to myself, while we stepped from slab to slab,
because the lanes between them were dark and overgrown. Some reptile could
have bitten us, some unstaked vampire could have seized us.
"I want to see her," Abraham said to me
while he waited for me on one of the stones he’d jumped onto, because that
was how we used to jump from slab to slab, as if playing hopscotch without
the pebble.
"First we’ll read a little," I said. I
grabbed his Zippo, lit it and illuminated the stone we were standing on,
crowded close together like lovers.
"Look, Abraham and Sarah!"
I knelt down and scraped the moss from
the star of David.
"What are you trying to tell me?" asked
Abraham, looking at me as if he were not all there. I told him he was
Abraham too, and that the first Abraham had a wife, Sarah, and that they
didn’t have any children.
"You can see how little things change
with time," I went on. "We’re just born, come into the name, and leave it
when the hour comes. We come, we go, and it remains. Thousands of men have
already entered and left your very name, Abraham. Now all of them are
crucified on the cross of chaos, horizontally, vertically. Sometimes it
seems there are too many of them, sometimes there will never be enough.
What you must do now is draw them together, as if you were solving a
crossword. You must solve your own crossword, Abraham, and that’s the key.
You get your identity. You forget the blank, and you exist. You act. It’s
worth working at your crossword all your life for that moment of action.
Then you smell the roots of your heavenly descent. You hold tight to them
like a sailor without hashish who holds tight to the ship’s ropes and
sniffs the smell of hemp. This is the place and this is the moment to draw
it all together. Think, concentrate, draw it all together."
You should have seen how in the next two
hours the pair of us – like shadows linked to that serenity, those graves –
thought, concentrated, drew together, solved our crosswords of shadows and
apparitions. Abraham erect, tense, eyes wide open, his glance searching
through the dark regions of time; and me, as well.
"And now try to pull up the plum tree," I
said, when I sensed that all the blanks in me were filled in and an
unbelievable power coursed through my veins. Abraham simply turned, grabbed
the tree and pulled it up just like that. He stood there with it in his
hands, still not believing in this new power of his, which only seconds
before had set the finches to flight, upset their peace and driven them to
concealment farther off in the dark.
"Now I can make it to Salonica," he said,
"to find her, to see her!"
And he shone, he glittered, he was
swaddled in a cloud of light in that ghostly atmosphere.
"Wait!" I said. "Think, and understand
that every man’s journey is an illusion. The only true journey is the
earth’s. In its turning. We are all always journeying together with it. Me,
you, and those oaks, and this graveyard where we’re walking now. It’s as if
we were in a train rushing towards its destination. I don’t see why we
should move up from seat to seat, from carriage to carriage, when the train
is taking us there already. That’s why I don’t travel any more."
"I want to see her!" said Abraham. He
leaned back, then hurled the tree up the hill.
"Now come with me," I said, and together,
under the veil of the night, we returned along the same path we had come by
to my yard.
3
Abraham’s two-story house crouched in its
gloom and misfortune as we drew near it.
"You go to the other side," I said to Abraham, and, full of hope, he
did as I said.
"What are we going to do?" I heard him
call from there.
"We’re going to move it," I said. "Get a
good grip of it and lift! Ready?"
"I’ve got it," I heard from the other
side. "Shall I lift?"
"Lift!" I said, and set to. Lord, how
lovely it was, that uprooting crepitation, that hope-engendering pain that
amounted to the birth of a new offspring, conceived in pure love, anointed
with young green basil.
"Let’s go!" I called, and with the house
in our hands we went carefully out through the narrow gateway into the
street.
"Let’s go!" said Abraham from the other
side, and I heard the tremor of joy in his voice.
"Straight ahead now, and watch out for
the wires!"
And we watched out. No damage must be
done. If the neighbors had been awake, if they’d been awake just that one
night, years later they’d have told their grandchildren how the gigantic
shadow passed them and darkened their windows, unintentionally increasing
the confusion in their stupefied brains.
Now we had to maneuver through the only
empty space in the row of houses that stood between the road and the empty
hillside that rose steeply towards the sky.
"Be careful not to scratch the walls!" I
said. "Once we’re through here we’re right there with the Jews, you hear?"
"I hear, I hear," Abraham stammered from
the other side.
"Be careful not to scratch the façade!
We’ve got to get it up there untouched!"
"Is it alright?" I heard Abraham from the
other end of the house between us when step by step we’d got through the
passageway and reached the slope. Abraham was going first, he was probably
stooping and going backwards up the hill.
"Wait a moment while I change my grip,"
he called. "It’s difficult like this!" While he carried out this
far-from-simple operation I felt the full weight of stones, bricks, tiles,
doors, windows that bore down on me, since I was ten meters lower and had
to bear the brunt of it.
"Let’s go!" said Abraham.
And we went. Slowly, stooping, the moon
lighting our path, the house swaying in our hands. It rocked as if in a
cradle. The steps of the wall rose parallel to us, I could see them
clearly, I could see my second life. I remembered my grandmother, my
mother, my father, and the hard poverty that crouched by the stove; I saw
myself young, small, with rickety legs, and I smiled. Because now, uprooted
from the blackness of that May night I was ascending the hill with Abraham,
with a load of fifty tons in our hands. And we felt fine.
When we’d gotten up the Jews’ hill we
turned left a little and moved onto the saddle between that hill and the
highest one.
"We’ll take a break here," I said. "We’ll
rest it here!"
We put it down. Abraham took out a
handkerchief from somewhere and gave it to me to wipe off the sweat, and we
sat by the front door, with our backs supporting the wall, so there was no
danger of its slipping and disappearing down into the darkness.
"Now I want to tell you about Laki," I
said, when after all that time I could look him in the eyes again.
"Tell us," he said.
"Laki, so my mother used to tell me, had
the most beautiful house in Bitola. The garden was full of roses. And he
loved Spasija very much. All very well, but they had no children. And over
the years he began to give her a bad time. He wouldn’t give her any peace.
And she was beautiful, the most beautiful rose in his garden. But without
sunlight, it began to fade."
"And?" said Abraham.
"And, one day she ran away from him to
Salonica and he, poor fellow, ups and sells his house with all its roses
and follows her. For three years, as my mother used to tell it, and she
believed it, he turned every stick and stone, searching for her."
"And?"
"And, he found her. But she’d married
again and he didn’t want to call on her. He simply bought the house
opposite hers and for the rest of his life he watched her through the
window."
"And I want to see her!"
"Then up we get," I said. "It’s not far
to the plateau."
4
Up there, on top of the hill, in the
middle of the clearing, there was an enormous rock. Three natural steps led
up to its flat surface. It really was like an altar.
"We’ll put it here," I said. "Put your
end on the rock, and I’ll hold it from here."
Slowly, carefully, as if he had a crystal
glass in his hands, Abraham placed his end of the house on the stone. The
moon shone brightly, lengthening our shadows over the bare ground.
"Go up and look out of the highest
window," I told him.
"I can’t see anything," he said, when
he’d thrust his head out through the window.
"Wait while I turn it to the south. Now?"
"I can’t see!"
"Stand up straight, close your eyes,
concentrate! Draw in the strength and the vision of all those Abrahams from
your downs and acrosses!"
"Good," he said, and he disappeared for
about five minutes.
"Now open your eyes!"
"Something’s happening!"
Slowly I crawled under the house,
supporting the free end on my back. When I got to the center, I spread my
arms under it and like a weightlifter raised it into the air.
"She’s there! She’s there!" Abraham
called. "Lift it a little bit more!"
I climbed the first step up to the rock.
"I can see her long hair!" Abraham
shouted towards the Aegean.
I climbed the second step.
"Her broad shoulders, her tiny breasts, I
can see them!"
I stood in the middle of the plateau with
legs astride and with outspread arms on which Abraham’s house rested,
stable.
"I see her! Hold on like that! I’m
watching her, I’m watching her!"
And down below us sneered the pock-marked
face of that conquered sky of human envy and evil darkness.
Translated by Margaret Reid
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