Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2003 - Ljudmila

his lips were moist. His hands were shaking, I saw. I hoped that his quick-witted,
flippant side would break through now, that he would laugh and say it had all been just
an exercise in self-irony.
"Yes, yes, that's all true, except we can always wring the chicken's neck", he said, and
then calmly proceeded to discuss human relationships as a striving for annihilation;
hence, revolution was the will of the masses. Stalin was the embodiment of the popular
will. He was fair, he did not spare even those closest to him. In cleaning up the world,
he brought hope in the New. Revolutionary rule was no better than what it overthrew,
but revolution fulfilled the dream of blood. If the blood of the righteous and innocent
was spilt, it cried out from the earth, asking God for justice. Revolution was a utopia
of ideal brotherhood rooted in blood. Brotherhood was the age-old dream of the new
man. D. cited time Bible, quoting from The Book of Genesis: "Let us make man in our
image, after our likeness". We parted. He was satisfied, I was exhausted and
demoralised.
We saw each other four or five times more, always in different, out-of-the-way places.
He did not ask me for any facts. I can safely say that he no longer even listened to, or
answered my questions; he was conducting a monologue. He quoted fewer and fewer
figures about weapons, or facts about military bases and Soviet supremacy in outer
space, and produced more and more muddled ideas about "the totality of the created",
about towns and wastelands where a new unity was being forged.
"We are all now in a state of anticipation", he said in parting.
I did not hear a word about him for six months, nor did anyone else from our old circle.
Then one day, in front of the Interior Affairs Ministry in 29 November Street, I ran into
an old school-mate I had not seen for at least ten years. He had finished law and was
now working at the Interior Ministry. He asked me up to his office, there was something
he wanted to tell me. When I walked into the stuffy room, the heavy, musty air knocked
me back, even though the window was half-open. Two office workers were sitting
across from each other, hunched over their desks, engrossed in their papers.
"Do you know who this man is?", my old school-mate asked.
Raising their heads, the two men looked at me. One was cross-eyed and the other as
pale and thin as a hermit.
"He's the one who works for the Intelligence Service", said my friend, offering me a
seat.
"Now all we need is Kardelj and we've got them both in our hands", add the one who
looked like a recluse.
We laughed, and then they explained that my friend D. had written to the Interior
Ministry denouncing me as an agent of the British Intelligence Service. He had sent
them a similar warning about Kardelj. They told me that he had disconnected his
phone, locked himself into his flat and was writing letters to Brezhnev.
That same afternoon, as if by telepathy, he appeared at the supermarket in Jovanova
Street. He had become heavier, cut his hair short and was unshaven, with puffy circles
under his eyes. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him avariciously pile the items
into his basket. He was choosing the bread when he turned around and saw me. His
eyes opened wide, as if he had just seen a vicious beast. oaming at the mouth he
shouted:
"Don't come near me, you spy!"
Dying of embarrassment I immediately moved away, dumped my shopping basket and
left the supermarket, my shopping undone.
My friend D. wound up in the prison mental hospital. There he wrote the novel Words
Uttered In A Groan. I saw the manuscript at the lawyer Baroviæ's, a common friend of
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ours who visited him occasionally. D. had bequeathed him the manuscript, saying: "To
be sealed until my death." It was an illegible mess of a manuscript, with page upon
page where all you could make out was the number 1948; that was probably the year
in which the novel was set. Only the last sentence was legible: caught in the undertow.
At the end he had signed it, then crossed out his signature and put in an X, like an
illiterate.
He died on December 19, 1974. It was snowing that day and the ground had turned
white. Only a handful of people attended the funeral; most of them I knew or had met
somewhere. Standing by the bier in the chapel was a large woman in mourning, a
transparent veil covering her face. Next to her were two vacuous-looking, disinterested
men. When the coffin was lowered into the ground, no one said a word, or even tossed
in a flower or handful of earth. Night was rapidly falling and the small group quickly
dispersed. I ran towards the tram, away from the cemetery and the spreading darkness
that was so rapaciously devouring the snowflakes. As I huddled in my seat, someone
placed a hand on my shoulder and said:
"We know nothing of one another, and many secrets will go to the grave with us!"
I saw the man who had been lingering around me at the funeral, he had brushed by me
two or three times and even wanted to strike up a conversation. I was in the mood to
discuss anything now, including death; I wanted to invite him to sit down, but he was
not on the tram any more. That stranger's hand, which had rested on my shoulder only
a moment before, weighed on me the entire time like a heavy tombstone. Who was that
man?
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Translated by Christina Pribiæeviæ