A Handful of Sand. Marinko Koscec

of the autumn night and the intensive quivering of the stars as I sieved the sky in vain, searching for the angel of sleep. All at once, behind my back I heard a sound like a breath of wind. I just managed to turn my head slightly, enough to glimpse an unnaturally twisted lower leg and a bare foot out of the corner of my eye. A split second later there came a thud, without an echo, as a heap of dead limbs hit the pavement and instantly pulped.

      She’d been ill, they said: in the head and elsewhere, and old and lonely to boot. But why did I have to be part of her relieving herself of her suffering? Why did she have to spill it all five metres from my window?

      Three months later it was the opening of my exhibition at the prestigious Gradec Gallery. On three levels, with TV coverage and the minister of culture in attendance, as well as all the significant acolytes of culture–twelve long years after my first exhibit in a suburban library. And there were flocks of tarted-up culture vulturettes, sighing and holding their hands to their hearts in front of the pictures and only able to stammer: It’s so… It’s so… Plus their strutting, parvenu husbands, square-headed and short-necked, who furtively noted the address with the intention of surprising their darling; their aesthetic interest was limited to the colours not clashing with the sofa. And then there were the perverts who merge with the crowd, unnoticed, but when they catch you alone in the studio there’s no getting rid of them. First they inquire circuitously about your techniques, about the meaning of this or that, discover cosmogonic connotations, make ever bolder allusions, and the whole time burn with only one desire: to unzip their flies and show you their jewels. The place was chock-full, but I spotted two or three other female artists discreetly letting themselves drift closer and closer to the curators and gallery owners, while looking anywhere but at the canvases. Quite indiscreetly, two male artists were ogling them with delight and a discerning thumb and forefinger on the chin, whispering into each other’s ears and bending double with laughter.

      I trembled with fear, and also shame, under the spotlights and the shower of eulogies. Being presented like some kind of circus attraction, being photographed for people’s private albums, touched and felt, and having a dictaphone thrust into my mouth was OK, that was part of it all. But my pictures–I felt as if I was now seeing them for the first time. The gallery walls bore the marks of the mourning which I had painted out on canvases day and night, for months, unaware of what I was doing. Now it screamed from the walls, showing me strung up in a hundred copies. I felt that everyone there in the hall must have noticed, that every last person saw me as I saw myself before them: not just naked but flayed alive.

      Yet the words praising my work gradually reached me and sank in, something about a ‘plunge into archetypical meanders’ and ‘the concatenated metamorphoses of points of departure’, about the paintings’ ‘psychogrammatic texture’ and the ‘intersecting of oneiric planes’, and it finally occurred to me how wrong I had been. There was nothing to be seen, either in me or the paintings. Now they belonged to the buyers, who could hang them wherever they liked. They were never mine anyway, but only passed through me. That brought relief; a huge burden left me, trickling away like sand through my fingers. At the same time, I rose up towards the ceiling and stayed there floating, invisible. I set off home, or towards what I had started to call home, in a stupor, even giggling a little. The bubbles of champagne converged to carry me down Vlaška and Maksimirska streets like on a cushion of air–even after I had noticed a commotion in front of the building, people wringing their hands and others running to the scene.

      My reflexes always set in too late. Anyone with the slightest instinct of self-preservation would have interpreted the commotion as a warning to turn around and go back without delay. But I kept walking, hypnotised, until I found myself eye-to-eye, literally, with what I had first taken to be a football under one of the parked cars. Only after staring for an eternity did I realise that it was the most important piece of the woman who had thrown herself off the roof to land in front of my window with more precision that her precursor. As my new friend, the caretaker of the building, explained to me in detail, the woman’s head had caught on a first-floor clothes line, rolled away and been hidden from the people who found the rest of her. Until I arrived, they’d been sure this was an unheard-of murder by decapitation.

      There was a curious watchfulness in that pair of eyes, something which long thereafter observed me timidly from the dark; now it’s with me to stay.

      When I finally turned and went back the way I had come, back along Maksimirska and Vlaška, it was quite involuntary. Only at the intersection of Medveščak Street did I realise where I was going and comprehend that I had to spend the night at Father’s. I ended up staying three days. He was attentive, cooked for me and brought the food to my room. I only left it to go to the bathroom and spent the rest of the time curled up on the bed. That at least enlivened him for a while. After such a long time, he noticed that I existed.

      On the third day, the landlady located me. She was full of comforting words but above all worried about how to find another tenant under these circumstances.

      ‘The caretaker has looked after everything,’ she assured me, ‘although she didn’t need to take responsibility. I paid her well.’

      ‘How do you mean take responsibility?’ I asked.

      ‘Don’t you know that you left your window open, so part of the unfortunate person, or rather what was inside…’

      At that point I hung up.

      It took me a lot of effort to imagine myself in that flat again. I could have asked someone to collect my things and store them somewhere for me; anywhere would do. But perhaps out of spite, or perhaps because it was hard to resist an opportunity to hurt myself, I returned. The woman who had taken on the unpleasant job had done her very best. She’d washed the curtains, polished the furniture and even ordered the cutlery in the drawers. But she was getting on in years, had a tremor, and the finger-thick lenses over her eyes prevented her from being particularly thorough. For days, I kept finding reminders of the event between the fins of the radiator, on my paintbrushes and even on the oil paintings I’d left to dry. I must admit, after the initial shock those stains and little relief-forming chunks fitted in very well on the canvases. The jumpers, who I’ll never know anything about (not that I want to) are sure to have had anything but that on their minds when they climbed up to the top of the building. But now they’ve become part of my art in a special way. That person deserves that their last traces be preserved, and at least they now hang in an ultra-swish dining room or the conference chamber of a big mobile-phone operator. In any case, their remains will serve to provide archetypes and oneiric points of departure for the art critics just as well as any stroke of my brush could.

      That event served to bring me together with the caretaker, who lived on the second floor. In practice, our rapport was formed around her almost daily visits, carrying mushrooms picked on the slopes of Mount Sljeme. They were just about her only food, a fact she tried to conceal along with the other signs of abject poverty. She got up at dawn and walked all the way there and back to keep fit, she said. Her mushroom-picking was actually risky given her short-sightedness because a toadstool or two is sure to have ended up in her bag along with the edible ones. I can’t stand mushrooms: I feel that living off decay is already common enough in the human kingdom. But the first time I accepted them in the name of friendship, and after that I communicated with that one person in the building. She saw that as her good deed, an opportunity to take care of someone. She’d let me make her coffee but would never have anything else, even when she sat for hours through to late lunchtime, telling me episodes from her life–stories sadder than sad. Although she did repeat them all several times, with considerable variation on each occasion. Her younger and only brother, for example, drowned as a child while trying to save a friend who couldn’t swim, but the second time it was a lamb he wanted to save, and the third time round he was killed by the Ustashi, the Croatian Fascists. That makes your ear a little immune after a while. I didn’t want to risk disposing of the mushrooms in our rubbish container, so I wandered the neighbourhood with bags of fungus. I hadn’t yet found her rummaging through the bins, but the prospects were all too likely.

      The title of caretaker helped her little in preventing a practical jokester from stealing the light bulbs on the ground floor as soon she replaced them. That, in conjunction with the