Ivan Dobnik - Vilenica

Ognjen Spahić · 273
take the paintings. Those were the last things she had left behind. In the
first months after their break up she came by once a week with her younger
sister and, without comment, emptied the closets, the shelves in the bathroom
and the kitchen cupboard. She took everything, even the half-empty
body milk, the coffee cup with Dali’s moustache, the tweezers, the nail
clippers and the incense. She gathered up things as if she were hiding the
evidence of a tragedy, the traces of a catastrophe that had annihilated a
town that, now, it would be better to wipe from the face of the earth, to destroy
the artifacts so that the whim of oblivion could open the door wide.
Her smell disappeared from the apartment two weeks after her departure.
The room where she painted and which she did not want to call a studio,
that was the one she emptied last. She showed up one morning with two
tipsy workers who took cardboard boxes and filled them with her painting
utensils, together with the garbage, furnishings and the clumps of paint
stuck to the parquet flooring. When they had removed the boxes, they reappeared
with two buckets of freshly mixed paint and did the walls. While
this was going on, Andrej sat in the living room trying to concentrate on
gulps of whisky and Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D Minor . He watched
them coming and going through the filthy glass where he could still see
her fingerprints. Through the glass where the man left his fingerprints as
he took away the last traces of her, thought Andrej. The fingertips are the
most intimate parts of the body. The bundles of nerve endings that define
the tangible world, that define foreign objects. Once the paintings were
gone, he would soak a rag in alcohol and polish the glass. He believed that
that would bring him some sort of tranquility. He sat in the armchair and
watched the man who looked at the paintings carefully for a few minutes,
as if he were deciding which he would remove from the wall first. Whoever
it was that painted these things . . . he said, looking at Andrej, he shook
his head and grabbed the first one in the series. He worked quickly and
skillfully. He worked with the dexterity of an executioner who is about to
hang four victims. Taking paintings off walls, that is what he has actually
devoted his life to, Andrej thought watching him as he carefully laid the
frames on the wooden floor. When he took down the third one in the row,
his strong masculine hands went to his face as he tried to see the cut on
the canvass that was pushing the blood out. There’s no hope for this guy, he
said, looking at Andrej and smiling. Wounds like these don’t heal, he said in
serious tones, acting as if he had said something smart and significant. I’m
leaving now, he gathered up the frames and headed toward the door. Andrej
looked at him and wanted to say something, but then he started to feel
that atomized confusion of thought that would, either in a few minutes,
hours or days, form into a monster made up of sadness, loss, depression
and death. He realized that he would not manage to cope with that and
that, as the last of her paintings departed, so did the last bits of sense that
gave life meaning. He no longer loved that woman and he had reached
closure about that a few months ago. Occasionally he imagined her naked