A Handful of Sand. Marinko Koscec

corridor to my basement flat in the evenings into fifteen seconds of panic. And it would do even less to prevent people in this part of Zagreb who wanted to commit suicide from thronging to our building, which was taller than the others, now that a pioneer had demonstrated how well it worked. In a flash of inspiration I stuck a note on the front door: To whom it may concern, the northern side is also good for suicide jumping. The next morning my friend just gave me a strange, mildly reproachful look. She was right, it was childish, so I took it down again.

      * * *

      For as long as I can remember I’ve been a magnet for weirdos, both for those who are kept at a safe distance with that label, as well as people who live among us peacefully and pose no danger until something in them erupts, for no apparent reason, and seem to need my proximity when it starts. It’s as if they recognise some kind of essential stimulus, like kindling needs a lighter; then afterwards they stop seeking me out and don’t approach me again for years, if at all.

      It began with Jelenko. I met him on my first day at school and immediately realised, with an instinct for danger like that innate to small animals, that it would be best to avoid him. He stared in front of himself, as pale as a ghost, almost transparent, obviously asking himself what he’d done to deserve such terrible punishment, as if he was carrying the world he’d been thrust into on his shoulders. Over time, this ceased to be dramatic and diminished to a melancholic resignation, but his air of absence never went away. He emanated it like a saint wears a halo–an absence so real that it was visible to the even slightly sensitive eye, as irrefutable as the body of a normal person.

      He did much better at school than all the others, but you could tell how little it mattered to him, and you could forget about the earthly application of whatever brilliance he had. Therefore he didn’t provoke any great envy or disappoint his parents’ ambitions: everyone sensed he was useless for any practical purposes and left him in peace.

      Jelenko’s lyrical dimension, the ethereality of his being, was where we differed; I’m rooted in the ground and only achieved good marks with great effort. But I am able to listen, and from time to time he had to speak his mind; early in secondary school he started dropping in and meditating about suicide. I would listen carefully, in trepidation, neither agreeing nor attempting to dissuade him, aware of how much his argumentation set him apart him from the kind of teenagerish ravings which make the enigma of death enticing, of how far he was from those who hang themselves because of a bad report card, breaking up with their girlfriend or being fat. Simply put, it was as if he’d been born not into this life but into an adjacent plane, which by some freak of nature turned out to be a dead end, and as such it was all the same to him if he was to cut his life short or wait for it to end by itself; he always had one leg in the other world.

      He could discuss death endlessly. These were actually dialogues with himself, because I had nothing to say on the topic. Death is something certain and eternal, everywhere and at all times; it’s damn hard to forget that but even today I don’t have anything to add. Maybe he came to me with his endless monologues because no one else took him seriously; but how can you dismiss someone when they show so much passion, when they only seem really alive when talking about death?

      One year after the summer holidays we had to write about an event we remembered fondly. Jelenko, in a solemn and moving voice, with a wealth of poetic detail, described the burial of his rabbit and the dignity and reverence with which his whole family consigned the body of this beloved being to the earth. While he read, and for some time afterwards, the classroom was oppressed by heavy silence, and the relief was almost palpable when the teacher stopped him from reading on, without a word of commentary.

      Still, the next day she suggested that he round off his composition with a story about the rabbit–about the feelings which had connected them and those which the loss of the rabbit aroused in him, with the aim of entering him in a national competition. Jelenko gave her an anxious look, but she persevered, thoroughly mistaking his reticence for modesty, until he shrugged his shoulders.

      In the extended version, the rabbit was an exceptionally sweet creature, hungry for love and capable of returning it. It hopped freely around the house, stood up on its hind legs and held out its little paws wanting to be picked up and scratched on the tummy; it even ate from a dish at the dining table. An albino with red eyes, it seemed to be aware of its own uniqueness and was only waiting for the day when it would start speaking. There was a special bond between Jelenko and the rabbit: it would always wait for him at the door and knew when he was coming; whenever Jelenko was sad, even if he was out of the house, it would curl up in its cage, no longer caring to be stroked or given any attention, and would fill the house with sadness. The composition made no attempt to explain why the boy decided to kill the rabbit, be it as an experiment or because he was deranged; it was simply presented as a fact. But the description of the act was exhaustive: when it proved too much to do it with a knife, he took a knitting needle and loosed it from his slingshot. He had to do this several times, but the rabbit didn’t budge or utter a sound. It waited patiently, as if with relief, for its destiny. The description of the funeral ceremony which followed now appeared in a different light and no longer had much prospect in the competition.

      After secondary school, Jelenko surprised everyone by deciding to become a priest. I personally think that, rather than ‘hearing the call’, he devised it as a way out–a ruse for avoiding both earth and heaven in a refuge halfway. In any case, he never got in touch with me after leaving for the seminary, and his family later moved away. I never saw him again.

      Goran, by way of contrast, was every parent’s dream: delightfully undemanding but not autistic enough for the psychiatrists. The kind of child you want to pat on the head, one to be seen and not heard. You could give him a lollipop and he wouldn’t ask for anything else for hours. Disinclined to tantrums even in puberty, there wasn’t a shred of rebelliousness in him.

      We didn’t have anything much to do with each other until we were sixteen. He called on me at home, shyly at first, with various pretexts, but soon he came every day and stayed for hours. What connected us was mainly that we didn’t have any friends; each of us in his own way enjoyed the reputation of a freak. But our conversations went into just about everything sixteen-year-olds can talk about, mostly books, especially those which were too complicated for us or where we only knew the title. And about sex: insights into the best ways to bring a girl to orgasm, the most intriguing places to do it, the most exciting positions, the comparative advantages of a virgin or a mature woman, and the secret inclinations of brunettes and blondes. Having exclusively theoretical knowledge of such matters was no hindrance to us. In other things, too, Goran liked to go into juicy details, smacking his lips like a connoisseur and pausing after spicy remarks to leave space for my admiration. I was well on the way to accepting him, if not as a replacement for my father, then at least as an elder brother–a kind of spiritual leader.

      And then, without any warning or any subsequent explanation, he broke into the Chinese embassy. At that time, I should emphasise, an ambassador wasn’t someone you could just bump into on any street corner like in our Croatian metropolis today; you had to go off to the then capital, Belgrade. It already exceeded the comprehensible that he got on the train one morning like he otherwise got on the tram to school, after one of the identical evenings we spent together, and I don’t remember us then or earlier having ever, even obliquely, mentioned Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mao Ze or feng shui, or travelling to the end of the night, or an acte gratuit. According to the version which leaked through despite his parents’ secrecy, he roamed the unfamiliar city until midnight, climbed the iron fence and silently crawled in through a window left slightly open, as if just for him. Today, the media would zero in on that act of pubescent stupidity and blow it up into an incident between the two countries, but back then one had to hide every eccentricity and white out the decadent blemishes on the moth-eaten garb of self-managed socialism. Besides, Goran hadn’t given rise to any suspicions of spying; apparently he didn’t touch a single document or try to open any of the drawers. He just sat on the floor and waited for the Chinese bureaucrats and then, without resistance, let himself be taken away by the police, who briefly and unsuccessfully questioned him before returning him to his parents.

      Time stood still for Goran after that. He was briefly institutionalised and then discharged