Hejira (a story of D.)
Erik Wennermark
D. lost in Tunisia. For what? For why? We have heard nothing of him in a year or more; we are sobbing, moaning, without D. Authorities are concerned only with the mundane. For a silly bint, who cares? She perched forever amongst titans! Rembrandt, Titian, et al., while our telepathy has been muted by a pedant God, his sycophantic servants.
We have no money, without D. We bellow. Our creator, career craters before us, ruined is ruined. The Tate lunch room conspicuous at our appearance, conversation guttering into smoked-salmon wraps, Fresca gone flat. We piece together what has occurred, if the pieces will fit. D. left Croatia for pastures other. We left Croatia, went London. We were arrested by middling meddling authorities for accomplishing, accomplice-ing. What right have they? What right? Why have they torn us apart? [He tore her apart – vicious it was.] My ankle bracelet tings. Questions, questions, questions!
Recap: D. had Van and Ada, Ada or Ardor, with him. Who gave him this book? Where did this come from? It was not we, nor she. We check notes scribbled upon sticky ice cream wrappers now carefully composed and catalogued in cardboard cabinets: it is a long path through a garden to the stone edifice. D. walks up on Ivan Meštrović, reads Van and Ada, looks Renoir. Renoir has got two sides. She is the double-sided girl—on one side she prays, chaste, in her bedroom, kneeling before a bureau covered in idols; the other side nude she swims, crosses and uncrosses her legs, coyly arches her arching back, water upon her breasts. Her wet nipples glisten electric. Water dripping, she prays. Ivan is monumental in consideration. D. makes notes and sketch makes sketch. Sun condenses in her pastel squirrel face. Prestidigitation.
We fidget buttons madly but D. won’t answer, our SMS like pissing in the ocean. We try the facsimile machine for better response, sending query we know gets D.’s goat re: his first star turn in the Chelsea scene, an installation akin the aftermath of a night spent carousing with the lads: miscellaneous rubbish, wooden crates, street cones, littered Jägermeister. It was called The Big Fight. Old machines and old projects needle him into reaction (just as we lovingly tickle his engorged ego).
D., mon ami,
About “The Big Fight”:
Can the scope of your genius ever be truly understood?
Was it possible to even imagine the preceding scene based on the aftermath?
What did documentation initially consist of?
In your opinion, was formal (video/photo) documentation necessary?
(i.e. limited edition prints and posters)
(i.e. teeth)
To wit, the importance of “The Big Fight” seems to be that it happened. Of secondary importance to “The Big Fight”: did it really happen?
To wit, the aim of “The Big Fight” seems to be creating an environment naturally that would, in “artistic fashion,” be created artificially. To wit, what was the aim?
Miracle of miracles, a received Napoli Il Vesuvio – the frozen corpses of Pompeii postcard some tortuous weeks later composed in charcoal and bogeys: Cock, meet smiling visage.
More questions. Waylaid by serpentine inspectors, how did D. escape the Dalmatian Islands. How did D. escape Interpol to the Dark Continent?
Sssshhhh… he says. It’s a lullaby.
Ssshhh… the heat is moving in.
Mirko say: D., be careful. Don’t fuck around here. You have big trouble my friend.
D. don’t listen or don’t hear or don’t care. Mirko, Mirko so much talk. D. motions a chatting Muppet hand. Shut your trap Mirko. Less talk, more metal. D. makes metal fingers. \m/
Mirko shrugs, turns up Slipknot.
Mirko sells bootleg C.D.s in a booth on the boardwalk. The Bay of Kotor shining bright refracting light, mountains fall slow down, tumble rocks into the walls of the old city, the quay, the boardwalk of cement, the booth of leaning plywood. Mirko is tall and has a long stringy ponytail. They are all very tall. D. thinks ballers, hoopsters: Toni Kukoč, Vlade Divac. On opposite sides of the war, Lakeshow and Bulls bombing bright, bombing Dubrovnik to shit, to piss, to shreds, raping 10-year-old Bosnian girls. Vlade smiles dick wet, Toni cries. Shake hands after the game.
Mirko plays drums in a Serbian metal band and sells bootleg C.D.s: Belgrade, Pančevo, Novi Sad, Bor, Niš, Subotica, Kotor.
How did I get here? D. thinks and remembers. On the bus, the window, a boy lifts his arm to wave, but the lumbering machine is gone.
D. run off pissed. Run off pissing himself. On the table of a bar on the Campo Santa Margherita in Venice. Headbutted by a bouncer. A knot and grinning cut on his forehead. Pretty neat. Didn’t see that coming. Neat move guy, he thinks grudgingly. Lost a flip-flop in the tumult. He rests his head against the window. It is cool on the knot, the smile. His dusty foot.
Something about a young girl in Split. She was split in Split. Rain. Planks. Sand. Something more he cannot recall. Have you seen the pictures, Valery? It will make a fine catalogue. Croatian Drug Camp is the name. The museum of torture in Venice was inspiration.
Miki says come on, come on, and grasps D.’s shoulder rough but friendly. Like D. he is missing teeth and they bond. Toothless Miki says I am Miki, I will take care of you. Toothless D. believes.
Miki is proprietor of the Konak Pension. D. gets in a cab with Miki and rides. Miki says no problem, no problem, I will take care of you.
Miki puts Edith Piaf on the record player. It is scratchy and vibrato. They drink slivovitz. Slivovitz gone, Miki makes tea. They drink tea and listen to the chanteuse. There is no need to speak. We regret nothing, they think, good, bad, in between.
***
Luggage is pulled out of the underbelly of the machine and passengers, D. included, grab their packs, sacks. They walk down a hill to a trio of border guards dressed in light blue standing behind a foldable table in the middle of the road with a sign taped to it. The sign reads:
in bubbly, multi-colored font. D.’s tongue nuzzles between missing teeth like a greeting. The guard squints in the sun and stamps his passport, hands it back. Un-uniformed men mill around prefab trailers conducting business with waves and whispers. An old woman teeters underneath multiple suitcases piled atop her head. She collapses and a guard snickers.
They shuffle across the border to another bus. An unswept walkway leads to hard seats with threadbare cushions exposing sharp stretches of crossbar. D. thinks of tetanus and pushes his hand hard into the corner of the metal. An analog clock bounces at the head of the bus, above the driver, tied in place with twine.
In Kotor, there is a square reminiscent of De Chirico. Outside the frame of the picture, D. sits in meditation until a tall blonde woman approaches him. She asks him in English if he has been hurt, if he needs somewhere to stay, referring, he supposes, to his face and hand, his bag. He nods and she quickly converses on the phone. She takes D. by the unbloodied hand and leads him down a series of dark alleyways. D’s heart quickens in anticipation. They climb a flight of stairs and the blonde woman knocks on a thick wooden door. A hunched grandmother in a shawl answers and D.’s excitement quickly fades. The old woman shows D. to a room overlooking the De Chirico square where he sits down on the small hard bed to rest but grows impatient. He goes for a walk up a hill. From the top of the hill he can see the width of the Bay of Kotor.
From above, white walls ten-feet deep meet the ocean and crawl up the backs of parched hills. A white fortress on a peninsula. Inside, narrow cobblestone paths are arranged in a loose grid. Laundry hangs, furtively waving in the choked breeze redirected through the alleys from the sea. D. goes down the hill to the main square and sits on a bench and reads Nostromo. Above him a flock of sparrows swirls against the crumbling white walls and broken red-tinted roofs. The wreckage is swept into the sea.
He returns to his room and borrows iodine from the old woman, paints new cuts on his feet, hands, and face.
Mirko does not like Montenegro. He asks D. questions about New York. D. gives a thumbs-up, gap-toothed grin. Hey party guy, Big Apple is best! Mirko grins, then frowns. Montenegrins carry guns and walk tough, says Mirko. He mimes these words like a toy soldier. They think they are different, but we are all Serbs, Mirko says. These Croatians, Mirko says, they have a list. My father is military. Croatians do not like Serbs. I cannot go. Mirko is exasperated. Mirko is sincere.
Don’t be sore old sport, D. says, I wish my pa were a war criminal too.
D. promises to return later and get Mirko drunk that they may forget the beauty of Croatia and the boardwalks of Kotor and remember only his father’s heroism. D. leaves the booth and goes to a café where he orders a kafa. In the café, there is a lounge singer who is scatting to a background of house music.
In a moment of divine inspiration, he gets Ratko Mladić’s (aka The Butcher of Bosnia) name in cursive script and a heart tattooed on his bicep. The Serb artist wears matching Le Coq Sportif trainers and tracksuit. They share liquor and high-fives, blot the blood, defeat.
D. goes to mosque and kneels to pray: Allah hu Akbar Allah hu Akbar / Ashhadu anna La ila ha il lal lah / Ashhadu anna Muhammadan rasul Allah
ICYMI: Miki and Mirko, not the same guy. For one: one listens to French chanson, the other nü-metal. For one: in the war they fought on opposite sides, raped sisters, aunts. (Mirko was sheltered from the horrors of the war.) The tattoo artist is named Jovan.
D. stands naked high atop the crag, arms spread wide under the blue sky. A bulbous Austrian man stares up at him from the sand. There is a hundred feet of air between D. and the water, one hundred and twenty feet between D. and the Austrian man. The Austrian man’s girlfriend stares at hypotenuse D. and there is a flash of knowledge as oracular as lightning in the blue sky. D. feels unnerved; there is sweat on his hands; he is scared of heights. The man shouts obscenities. D. replies with a middle finger. D. is weightless. D. is beautiful in the air.
Nearby is an old fishing village surrounded by Russian-owned vacation bungalows. Wives and girlfriends manicure and pedicure. With neon fingers and toenails, they buy cheap swimwear and straw hats for corpulent men with tender noses. Stray dogs on the beach fight, yowl, fuck. A drunk oligarch throws a bottle. A dog yelps and bleeds. Pawprints disappear.
Bats flit. Ghost soldiers shuffle.
An overweight tourist leans into a teenage sex-worker across the small table. He’s drinking a beer, she, a chocolate milkshake. “Do you remember your first love?” he asks in heavily-accented English. He continues quickly without awaiting an answer because he does not care. “I was six years old. She was my nanny and I was so in love. Nothing is like this – the first time of love.” The girl nods, coaxes chocolate shake through the straw. Anger flits through the man’s face, followed by a louder sadness. She is not the nanny and he is not the little boy.
D. feverishly scratches the bandage on his face and shudders like a broken machine. Fumbling he clutches the tiny fork and slips a sliver of raw octopus into his mouth.
***
It was on the Lido we first took our own life. Like Aschenbach, we thought we could escape the surrounding sickness: a vaporetto’s worth of blight. Our trial was not for a young boy’s cock, no, but something far larger (if you’ll forgive the gag, and doubly so). It was Art of course! Big-A and all that. It was for D.’s misunderstood genius that we walked into the surf, water filling our shoes, squelching the sand. The resplendent Florentine leather of our loafers degrading and cracking, the wet fabric of our linen slacks dully slapping our legs. Up to our balls in the Adriatic, we could feel the weight against the water, swinging like a pendulum, and stumbled forward. A strong wave hit our chest; it pushed us back and we screamed in honest fright, tears spilled copiously down our cheek and chest. This was the end. We girded ourselves to death and dove forward, spitting contemptuously into the sea. The dullards had won. Hands clawing up sand, wasted toes pinching, we blew the foul bilge from our mouth. Saintly, we swam and swam through underwater black.
Back on dry land, D. consoled Miki with a drink from his flask. Miki, already drunk on chanson, spoke of a tunnel:
During the long siege of Sarajevo, Bosnian forces held a strip of land near the airport. The invaluable isthmus facilitated escape from an otherwise shuttered city and was reached via deadly passage across an unused runway. Serb snipers murdered some 800 civilians as they dashed haphazardly across the wide-open space of the tarmac, leaving their bodies for the birds. Even after United Nations forces negotiated with the Serbs to reopen the airport for delivery of humanitarian supplies, innocents continued to be carrion; it seemed the U.N. could use the airport only so long as they did not aid fleeing Bosnians. To solve this dilemma, a tunnel was dug below the runway and desperately needed supplies were able to enter, or people escape. The underground passage was supported by wood beams and held a narrow track for pushcarts. It was a piece of engineering you might have expected to see during the Second World War, built by the Jews of Warsaw who fruitlessly sought freedom from that death house. In place of rotting crates of expired medicines lining the dank earthen walls there is a small museum now. You can walk through a section built under the bombed house of the host family. The son is keeper of the museum. The Number 1 tram goes all the way. * **
Somehow, still alive, we await the next work, as Mohammed from the cave.
*Author’s Note: At “Miki’s” suggestion, I journeyed to the museum, but couldn’t figure out the Number 1 tram’s payment system so just sat down without paying my fare. Some thirty or forty minutes later, a muscular uniformed man with a broken nose and scarred face approached me and asked for my ticket. I feigned ignorance, attempting to look dumb and touristic. After some confused back and forth, I was startled to be physically pulled off the tram by two Bosnian transit cops. Far from the safety of the city and standing under a concrete overpass surrounded by large grassy fields, the cops patiently explained to me that this simply wasn’t a beneficial situation: I was a visitor to the country and had broken the law; we were going to have to work something out. I nodded urgently. The cop shrugged and carelessly stared around at the empty landscape. I cycled through various ghastly scenarios. Eventually, I guess having grown bored of playing with the American, they looked at each other and came to an agreement. “Twenty dollars,” the cop said. “Sure,” I said. “No problem,” and quickly handed over the cash. They thanked me and I crossed the tracks to wait for the next tram back to the city.
** Miki’s speech is somewhat borrowed from an old touristic blog I can no longer locate and that seems to have vanished from the internet. The above author’s note was partially cribbed from my own prior nonfiction, “My Balakan Holiday.” I truthfully couldn’t figure out how to pay for the tram, but I suppose I stole that too. Volim te Sarajevo.
Erik Wennermark’s novella The True Story of Yu Fen, short story collection Evil Men, and nonfiction on topics such as the politics of Hong Kong independence and the death rattle of an Indian guru can be found dispersed on the web and beyond. "Hejira" is the second "Story of D." and follows the narrative of "Essay to the Exhibition: Croatian Drug Camp," which appeared in Portland Review 62.1.