A Handful of Sand. Marinko Koscec

in 2006.

      The day dragged on until it was finally time for dinner. A handwritten board solicited me with Taiwanese delicacies at a special season’s discount. The restaurant was at the bottom of the court, squeezed in between a flower shop and an undertaker’s. A reception desk almost as high as me rose up immediately inside the premises, with a hotel bell which you had to ring for service. A frighteningly broad female face appeared and observed me from below for several seconds over the desk; for a moment I thought it was a gimmick–a carnival mask they put on as a welcome. Eat one person, she said with an intonation probably supposed to indicate a question, descended from her throne and beckoned with her finger for me to follow her into an empty hall. Where exactly to seat me still demanded some thought; she took me to a table in one of the compartments for couples behind a sumptuous screen of plywood embellished with a jungle of imitation carved tendrils of vibrant red, green and gold. The whole place was smothered in vivid opulence, gold paint and plastic. Every table was dominated by a bouquet of artificial flowers. Imitation candlesticks and a plethora of Oriental abstract art hung from the pink-painted walls, while polychromatic paper dragons with protruding tongues dangled from the ceiling, or rather from the canopies hanging low over my head. As a counterpoint to that colourful exaltation, a bloodless female voice oozed from the loudspeaker for the duration of my stay in the establishment. It was so dirgeful that even the carpet would have started to cry if it understood Taiwanese, and was accompanied contrastingly by a rather irritating piano, which at times sounded like a French chanson, at others like a salsa. A piercing hum sporadically drowned out the music.

      This went on and on, and my food still hadn’t been served. But the smell of frying issued from the kitchen, heavy and abundant, and the hasty rattle of utensils intimated that a large family was rushing to serve a sudden throng of guests, although not another soul turned up the whole time I was eating. Still, the proprietress finally brought me the clams I had ordered and ceremoniously presented them together with a bowl of rice and a bottle of tap water. They tasted like pork. Not eat much she commented when returning the change, as concerned as she was disappointed. I replied with my best imitation of a Taiwanese smile and bow.

      For all the abundance of Winnipeg’s gastronomic attractions, there is none I’ve visited a second time. Yesterday, at a Japanese restaurant, the decor was exactly the opposite: rectangular and austere, with reproachfully clean lines and a minimum of colour, pale yellow and black; the lighting was subtle, attenuated by rice-paper screens; and there was no music. The owner, his wife, and two boys, evidently their sons, stood in line at the entrance. All of them, one after another, called on me while I was eating to ask Everything OK? or to fill up my water glass. I ruminated on their credo engraved in a little plaque in the restroom: Who comes as a friend, always comes too late and leaves too early. I have always firmly believed in a friendly attitude, and it was with such that I went to see them; yet this adage informed us that every hope is futile–it’s always too late, if not too early.

      At the table next to me, two Japanese businessmen were conversing quietly between mouthfuls. They understood each other perfectly, after just a syllable or two; as soon as one started to speak the other would nod, and they filled in the pauses by both nodding. The men were restrained, their manners refined, and they fitted flawlessly into the setting. But during the course of dinner they gradually shed their veneer; a second bottle saw their jackets thrown over the backs of the chairs, their tie-knots loosened, and the ties then rolled up and pocketed; they talked ever more loudly, smiled from ear to ear, laughed spasmodically and wiped their sweat-beaded foreheads on the tablecloth. A group of Asian girls turned up from somewhere–teenagers, probably on an excursion. They clustered around five joined-together tables and immediately started chirping in a language the waiters didn’t understand, full of long ascending tones. Negotiations were conducted in slow and painful English: one of them interpreted for the others, translating the name of every dish on the menu, which led to lively debates. Finally, a huge shared platter arrived, noisily greeted with shouts and clapping, and was immediately attacked with cameras. They took snapshots of each other hugging or fraternising with glasses of water. Not one of them drank any alcohol, but they were soon seized by rapture and the place was inundated with a mood of collective inebriation. The businessmen were joined by the owner, pretty pickled himself, who started an exchange with one of them about something very funny; they burst out laughing together, slapping their thighs and showing all their teeth. The other businessman tittered with his head on the table as his eyes wandering off and he hummed to himself intermittently. All this proceeded quite naturally and anything could have happened; we were just a hair’s breadth away from all bursting into song together and dancing traditional dances on the tables as we welcomed fire-eaters and trapeze artists accompanied by giraffes.

      The flirtatious glances the girls were casting my way, at first coy, became very open and inquisitive, accompanied by whispers and giggles. The atmosphere inspired me and I was tempted to move to their table, almost convinced that I would swiftly bridge the language barrier, racial and age differences, perhaps some distinctions in world view too, socialise freely with them all, and head off home with them arm in arm, wherever that may be.

      But in the end I went outside: into the awful, crusty cold, amidst the snowflakes which were dancing again, this time in a horizontal danse macabre borne on a marrow-biting northerly wind, and I dragged my bag of bones slowly through the graveyard of ghostily extinguished glass-and-steel giants.

      It’s not masochism which draws me to such restaurants. On the contrary, there’s usually a beneficial, liberating turn of events: my accumulated grief is stirred up, grows to unbearable satiety and bursts out in bouts of hysterical laughter, before morphing into a diabolical euphoria; this subsides into an ease which I take away with me, almost floating. In the hours that follow, everything is rinsed out of me, everything is gone. I’m damned wherever I am and whatever happens; I’d give my last piece of clothing if someone asked, or calmly watch my inner organs be excised.

      And in the morning, on the dot of five, it starts all over again.

      * * *

      Exactly three weeks later they started jumping. There had only just been time for me to acclimatise and for the aggression of unfamiliar smells to stop. Time for the spirits of the former tenants to disperse–that residue of messy, broken lives; that concentrate of misery. And time for me to attain at least a fragile peace with this space, without any ambition to feel it would ever be mine.

      The living room became my studio; there was a bathroom, a kitchen with a dining corner, and a tiny closet of a bedroom. And as much light as I needed, thanks to the generous windows: fortunately with bars. Call it paranoia if you like, but being alone in the basement flat, I was glad they were there. I soon learnt that dogs raised their legs at the windows, even those which were kept on a leash. I had always wanted to have a dog, or at least its bark. Like the yapping which the neighbour has to guard his flat, three or so floors up. The windows were also pissed on by beer-soaked football fans after every match, since the stadium was just one hundred metres away. They always came in groups and yowled their Dii-naa-mo or We are the champions, Croa-a-atia! There was a cramped parking area in front of the windows, and in the middle some of the tenants heroically maintained a little island of greenery with signs like Don’t kill the plants, God is watching you! Opposite there was a house which a religious community built for itself. They had evening gatherings several days a week, and also on weekends. You didn’t see the people arrive, you just heard the strains of a song, barely audible but borne by an ever greater chorus, and ever more imbued with His voice. When they really whooped it up, I opened the windows and fired back with industrial noise. Or with the folk singer Sigfriede Skunk, from her Satanistic phase which ended in her being put away in the loony-bin. That didn’t discourage the faithful vis-à-vis, but at least it struck a kind of balance in the sound waves. I also heard my upstairs neighbours very clearly whenever they had sex, or when they argued and started smashing the furniture. Once I tried to signal to them that my ears didn’t want anything to do with it by banging the broomstick on the ceiling. They took this as a wish to participate, as if I was flirtatiously egging them on, and replied with an identical tock-tock-tock before going on to groan even more heartily and fuck each other with a vengeance.

      And then a lady threw herself off the twelfth floor. I was sitting