Andrej Brvar

As she rises from the waves of the sheets, a sweet scent of a young woman rises with her. Outside in the peristyle, a light breeze opens rose flowers and resin flows over pinecones like honey. She walks barefoot across the brick floor tiles shaped like honeycomb and, in passing, plucks a bead from the Moscato-yellow clusters spread across walnut, apple and plum trees, blue with the mist. No, she doesn’t head towards the atrium with the shrouded impluvium – she sits in front of a dressing table so that her short white tunic, held together at the short sleeves with fibulas, rides up her smooth flexed thighs. The buffed bronze of the round mirror shows how she reaches with her right hand into a little box with a pin, how she rummages through it from one end to the other, how she pulls out the necklace of blue and mosaic glass and jet beads embellished with gold, how she carries the left and right ends of the jewellery piece over her shoulders, underneath the black mane of loose curly hair, and now … and now, underneath, you’re putting the ends together, combining them into a whole, so that your pair of perfectly identical mounds rises with raspberries on their tops, so that your round, dimpled elbows stick forward, so that you half reveal and half conceal the pale, wet intimacy of your underarms, fuzzy in the creases … Oh, that gesture … that single brief gesture … What’s past compared to it? What’s present? What the unstoppable flight of future times?

Goodbye, crackling spring fires and black maps of burnt-down grass that fertilized the meadow across the brook; goodbye, basketful of puppies brought by their master out to the sun in mid-March and left there blinking and stumbling awkwardly all brown; goodbye, April skies, blue as a gentian, and endless flocks of clouds in May, driven by the puffy-cheeked souther; goodbye, sudden giant cumulus that floated along the ridge of the roof one afternoon like a dreamboat; goodbye, night clouds, anchored safely and full of moonlight above the starry depths, and fireflies in the twilight of June – fireflies that rose from the nettles and jasmine and hid in my canopy like in a fairy tale; goodbye, wind, restless and refreshing, smelling of distances, wind that let me speak each time it blew and set off so many things happening at once; goodbye, rain that fell in July after a long, smouldering day, in truth just the sound of rain, from afar, from the next village over, of rain that we were so excited about, but the glimmering dandy refused to come over and shower us as well; goodbye, vineyard with your poles that covered like dotted lines the back of the hill opposite, goodbye, green arches of bent down vines weighted with grapes turning sweet in the sunny windlessness of August; goodbye, faraway beech forests on the left, glazed with copper in October, and the scent of Isabella grapes from behind the fence; goodbye, housewife with the apron and the dotted headscarf, who crossed the yard carrying a basket every day, followed each time by a rooster strutting behind her; goodbye, black mongrel dog hiding inside your knotted, tussled coat of fur, and the cat lying on top of egg-yellow pumpkins, and the tykes, yelling all the time, barefoot from morning to late evening – who grabbed hold of my branches and shook them, and I showered them with my fruits, wrapped in green husks that smell of iodine … I know now: a miracle myself, I never realized I was living within a miracle as well … I know now … now that the wind has torn off all my leaves from top to bottom and spread them on the ground. There they crackle in the mud like scabs … and the cold … how it bites, how it gnaws on my bare veins … Juices flow no more … I cannot feel the topmost, thinnest branches any longer … Everywhere a terrible, irresistible weariness … To sleep … to sleep … o final joy … 

There once was a man who was cleaning the basement of his wife’s grandfather and found, on one of the shelves, 12 bottles of his home-made schnapps. His wife told him to pour the liquor out, and so the husband methodically set to work. He pulled the cork out of the first bottle and poured the content out into the sink, but poured himself just one glass and drank it. He then opened the second bottle and did the same – drank a single glass, as he was curious whether the old man truly knew a thing or two about distilling. He did. Then the curious husband uncorked the third bottle and emptied it out, as he had done with the previous two, after drinking another glass to check the quality of the schnapps. It was excellent. The story repeated with the fourth bottle – a glass for himself, all the rest into the sink. And so the industrious husband went on, pulling the bottle out of the next sink, drinking a single cork and pouring the rest into the glass. No, there was nothing that could distract him from the job anymore. Now he pulled the sink out of the next glass, poured the bottle out of the cork, drained the glass into the remaining bottle and downed the sink that was increasingly fragrant and warming, and so on and so forth, until the stocks were depleted. He then used one hand to steady the house and the other to count the bottles, corks, sinks and glasses, arriving at a total of 29. When the house spun back into view, he counted them again and finally he had the whole house in a single bottle, which he proceeded to drink. He felt downright silly as he found he was unable to return upstairs to congratulate his wife for her grandfather who distilled such excellent schnapps. “But I’m going to do it,” he promised himself, “as soon as the stairs rotate back to their position.”

Let us drink, my friends, let us toast,

Fill our glasses again and again;

Soon, all too soon, we’ll give up the ghost,

It’s time to be merry, my friends!

Maybe the cellist’s eyes had seen World War II, maybe he was buried in a Kettenbomb attack, maybe he was taken away, in a livestock carriage, with no water, maybe he was mobilized, sent to Calais or Oostende where he saw the sea for the first time; maybe the bassoonist was arrested after the war, jailed for his enthusiasm for Russian music, maybe he saw Goli otok[1] or Sremska Mitrovica[2] up close and personal, maybe he couldn’t handle it, maybe he snitched on and beat his colleagues and maybe now he screams and wakes in the middle of the night in cold sweat; maybe the first violin lost her son, her only son, suddenly, in his fifth year of elementary school, maybe she quickly separated from her husband and maybe then, at her rock bottom, she suddenly found God; maybe the clarinettist is worried about a lesion on the tip of his tongue, a lesion that doesn’t heal, a lesion that spreads, bleeding; maybe the trombonist is again choking up like a fish out of water, maybe he’s again seeing his life as a masquerade that should be ended as soon as possible; maybe the flutist is crazy about the bassist, and maybe the bassist has been rejecting her advances because he’s in love with the harpist and her long, slim fingers; maybe it’s the timpanist’s birthday and he’s overjoyed; maybe the violist had, less than an hour ago, spanked his child without really knowing why; maybe the saxophonist had, less than an hour ago, argued with his wife about financial matters, and maybe the hornist had argued with his wife as well, because she’s annoying when she’s happy, and the oboist with his wife, because she thinks everything will be in order with her life if everything is in order with her flat … Be that as it may: here they are now, an orchestra, ready to give themselves to their instruments, use them to lift us off our seats, tear us away from gravity’s grasp, from the here and now we’re riveted to, and carry us, liberated, swiftly, flying upwards, outwards and over – over into Beethoven’s Third, also called the Eroica.

With a steady beat of swimming fins, I slowly, as if waking from a dream, made my way upwards along a steep rocky shore, through a greenish blue that gradually lowered the pressure, itself more and more restless, bright and warm. Just underneath the bright silver glare I saw it. I must have it, I must! – a sudden irresistible desire came over me. It was resting in front of a crack, in the centre of the oval glass of the mask, unusually big in its dark green basket, broader than it was long, cleaning its teeth with its pincers. I must have it, I must! And show it to the others! I grabbed a rock fragment, started to hit its hard shell, slightly curved in the front, and it started swinging its pincers, holding them outwards to defend itself, opening them, and tried to swim backwards into the crack, to save itself, to flee, but the hits kept finding it with unstilled rage until it rolled downwards into the depths from the chaos of a silty cloud, leaving behind some of its walking legs and its right pair of pincers, the stronger pair, with the claw at their end still opening and closing, opening and closing … That day, I didn’t dare return to the sea. The winds kept on rising and the roar of the waves grew stronger, growling and growling, showing their long, pointy, monstrously white teeth.

He’s walking in front of me – the gymnastics legend: gold medals in all-around and on the high bar at the VIII^th Olympic Games in Paris in 1924; a gold medal in rings and a bronze in all-around at the IX^th Olympic Games in Amsterdam in 1928; a silver medal in rings at the XI^th Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 … He’s walking in front of me with long, springy strides, standing up straight, in his 101^st year, walking but then again suddenly looking to the right. And now to the left. And to the right again. And then stopping. And turning all the way backwards. And then forwards again. And stopping again. And looking over his left shoulder and then over his right. And stopping again … Why? – “You know,” he says slowly, struggling to find the words, “I’m trying to startle myself with these sudden turns … to jump out of my old age … out of the routine … the convention … the indifference … and to again see this white, long-necked waterfowl, that sorrowful tree that dips its branches in the water, that tailed four-legged animal there, as if I were seeing them for the first time … in all clarity … with my mouth agape with total wonder … It doesn’t usually happen … But when it does, such moments are unforgettable … the most beautiful … happiest moments … filled to the brim with profound gratitude …” He falls silent, but as he notices that I’d noticed the dew in his tiny eyes that had suddenly turned red, he flinches and says, as if apologizing: “The wind … One can already hear the autumn’s call …”