A Handful of Sand. Marinko Koscec

remember his drawings even more clearly. Each in its own way showed living labyrinths: scenes of teeming action, dense and compact, full of interlaced movements, collisions, rifts and transformations. They were covered from edge to edge in intricate patterns, calligraphic tendrils and arabesques which intersected and merged, plunging into one another, vanishing into depths and forming bizarre figures here and there with unbelievable, enchanting colour combinations. There wasn’t a single empty spot. It was impossible to recognise anything from the earthly world from up close. But when I moved back a little, without realising what they were about, I felt a childlike sense of bliss–at the absolute tranquillity they emanated. Even today I wouldn’t be able to judge the artistic worth of those drawings, but one thing is for sure: neither before nor since have I seen anything more beautiful.

      He’d once been a promising young nuclear physicist, he willingly told me, a university dux with offers of a career abroad, but he kept putting it off for the sake of a girl; he burned with love and waited impatiently for her to decide. Until one day she gave him a simple, dry No. And no question he could ask explained where it had all disappeared to so abruptly: all the warmth, the fusion of their souls, the moments of inconceivable tenderness… How could it be that he was suddenly deprived of all that mattered to him? Forget about physics–all he wanted was her and to devote his whole being to her happiness. For days he called and beseeched her, promising any sacrifice and even threatening to kill himself, but that only strengthened her resolve and added to her annoyance.

      I’ve reconstructed the way he described things, but I remember the end of the story word by word. She agreed to another date, under her conditions, at the local football grounds. She met him in the middle of the pitch and said: There, exactly where you’re standing, I’ve fucked half the junior team. I had such earth-shaking orgasms that I thought my brain would explode, if you have even the slightest idea what I’m talking about. Have you got the point now? Is it enough for you to leave me in peace?

      It was. He turned and went; he didn’t know where to, or how much time passed after that. The next thing he remembered was the hospital. He had only positive things to say about it: everyone was friendly, the food was fine, his parents often visited him, and they brought him all the paper and drawing supplies he wanted. It was only here that he felt the need to draw, and he didn’t stop, from morning till lights-out. But when we returned a year after moving to Gabrek’s, there was no trace of Zoran and I never heard of him again.

      I wouldn’t know what to single out from that year. I didn’t make friends with anyone at the new school. There was nothing of interest at home; Mother temporarily overcame her hysterics, and overall she suddenly seemed to have got it all together. She got along fantastically with Gabrek, or at least that’s how it looked; I don’t remember a single quarrel, or one of them even raising their voice. An exceptional peace reigned in the flat, all the more seeing as Gabrek didn’t allow television or radio. I didn’t miss any programmes in particular, but his ban condensed the silence into something morbid. He only consumed the external world as printed on paper and spent most of his time reading the newspaper in the armchair. Apart from the rustling of the pages, you could hear him clucking with his tongue, like a clock emphasising significant seconds to the rhythm of its own inspiration; originally the clucks must have been substitute for a toothbrush, but over time they grew into a means of expression with a broad range of applications, from approval and surprise to disgust at what he had just read. He was mild-mannered, almost always in a good mood and happy to help Mother, but as soon as she left him in peace he would grab a newspaper and be consumed by it, and all that was to be heard were his clucking noises. The day Mother told me–without explanation–that we were packing our things, he only raised his gaze when the boxes had piled up in the hall.

      But there was something of a homme fatal about him because the next year Mother announced we were moving back to Gabrek’s and shrugged her shoulders at all my questions. The first move had been in the summer time. Now it was midterm and winter, which caused certain complications and understandably provoked comments from classmates and the neighbours, who were even gladder when we returned, in exactly the same way as before, after less than a month. The good thing was that Gabrek never showed up again.

      In the meantime, the house had gone to the dogs. We found it in a sorry state: the walls were green from moisture and a lasting chill had sunk in; it was full of holes, dead flies, mouse droppings and unimaginable smells as if to show us how much it had appreciated our care of it (or perhaps the totality of our existence as seen from inside). Mother actually cared very much for cleanliness and order; once, late at night, I found her in the bathroom trying to scrub something out from between the tiles with a toothbrush and grinding her teeth so fiercely that I returned to bed in fear. From early childhood I carried a feeling of guilt around with me because of my alleged slovenliness, which in my mother’s eyes was a harbinger of delinquency, a path to certain ruin and failure. In fact, the fear of irritating her actually made me develop a pedantry bordering on the pathological, an intolerance of what people like to call creative disorder, everything unfinished and abandoned which was up in the air, including stray embryonic ideas; in other words, I had a precocious obsession with order worthy of a born bookkeeper. After that second outing, however, things stayed in their boxes for a long time, perhaps in anticipation of another journey in the opposite direction, or more likely because of the utter futility of any efforts to keep them in their right place.

      The house weighed heavily on our minds. Mother heroically resisted its collapse, first by herself and later with my help, but this didn’t bring about any lasting solution. The house, like our livelihood, rested on fragile foundations. Everything else; the cracks, the leaks and the never-mentioned but credible concern that the roof could come down on our heads in both a physical and a figurative sense, were the inevitable consequence. He, whose name wasn’t to be mentioned (and his heavenly forefather, when we’re talking about the collective structure of things) built it quickly, without a building permit, convinced of his inborn talent for architecture; plus the workers had syphoned off some of the material for more profitable purposes, my mother claimed. For lack of documentation, the house couldn’t be entered in the land registry and so formally didn’t exist, which in practical terms prevented it from being connected to municipal services. An electricity cable was installed thanks to the kindness of a neighbour, but his generosity didn’t stretch to a water pipe. Mother liked to repeat his words, No man alive is going to go digging up my courtyard. Needless to say, his ‘courtyard’ consisted of piles of rubble overgrown with weeds and nettles.

      For years I watched her from the windows, still too small to take on the chore of going to the water pump several times a day; in those days it used to be down by the crucifix, so that in the neighbourhood we called that spot ‘at the cross’. Pumping water was strenuous, even for men, but for Mother it was a welcome opportunity to exchange a few words with the bleeder on the cross. Then she tramped back up the street carrying the full buckets, with a defiant fag between her lips.

      In the mood of piety prevalent in the nineties, after the war, the municipal council had the inspiration of changing the name of our street to The Way of the Cross. But the insight prevailed that the name was too grand for a cul-de-sac which turned into a muddy creek, especially when heavy rain made the septic tanks overflow. But they did see fit to discontinue the free water from the pump. Fortunately, Mother was able to solve the problem beforehand; just how, she didn’t want to say; but one day workmen turned up, dug a duct out to the street, knocked massive great holes in the walls, and the water flowed. It took much longer to patch up all those holes, and for years they let in the draught and the dust. Then Mother got hold of a loan and a ‘Normalisation Project’ popped up on our agenda, which meant doing away with all the gaps and blemishes in the house. Unfortunately, things got bogged down before the end. It would have been quite contrary to Mother’s nature to have at least consulted someone when setting the priorities; one result was that the reinforcement of the load-bearing walls lost out to an extension of the upper storey. We also got a lovely new façade, it’s just a shame that it started to crack so quickly and peel off. Our ground-floor ceiling was so unpleasantly low that you could touch it with your arm outstretched, though nothing could be done about that; it had already been dark inside because the windows were so small, and you needed to turn on the light during the day as well; but the result