A Swarm of Dust. Evald Flisar

when she rubbed her back with a towel she leaned slightly backwards. He saw the blackish shadow beneath her belly. None of this seemed unusual to him, he was cut off from experience. And so he could not be surprised that his mother had stripped off in front of him. The thought could not take hold that maybe she did not see him and was convinced that he was not there.

      Then she put the towel down on the bench, left the water in the basin, rummaged among the things on the edge of the bench, found some scissors, went over to her bed, sat down, bent over and began to cut her toenails. With each one he heard a slight click. The moon shone on her back. Janek could see her vertebrae, dividing her back into two halves. When she had finished her toenails, she lay back, raised her hands in front of her face and began on her fingernails. Once again, they could be heard hitting the wall and the floor.

      Then she stopped for a moment, placed her hands beside her and looked at the ceiling, as if in thought. Janek could hear her breathing. He could see the slight rise and fall of her breasts. It seemed as if she was trembling a little. Probably the cold was getting to her. But she still lay there without getting under the cover.

      What happened within him that he suddenly got up and moved towards her? Our interior world is such an anthill of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, emotions and impulses that at certain moments, even with the sharpest eyes, it is not possible to penetrate it. Allowing for the possibility that we might be wrong, we might say that within young Hudorovec in those moments when he was cut off from experiencing, there expired all the strange anxiety that women and sexuality evoked within him. When the sensory and perceptual world prevailed, weakening his mental capacities, his instincts became stronger and his reactions began to resemble the reactions of animals, guided by the impulses of the real world. At such moments his sexual drive must have been stronger. We all know how dogs behave; we’ve all seen them pairing on the road in full sight. First the sniffing, then the running, the agitation, a kind of wooing, in between some snapping and sharp teeth, hackles rising, and finally the submission of the female and the action of the male. All this happens without the presence of the mental world, it happens beneath the wings of the sensual, within the framework of instinct.

      When Janek shuffled over to his mother’s bed, he certainly wasn’t struggling with fear, with indecisiveness. He was not clear what he was doing, since he had never done anything like this before. He was being drawn to his mother’s naked body on the bed, just as the animal male is drawn towards the female when he sees or smells her. His mother started in fright and exclaimed: ‘Janek!’

      In young Hudorovec’s mind associations were triggered: his mother’s shriek was like the hoarse bark of the fox he had heard in the woods. But that was just a momentary flash that quickly vanished. He was not aware of his mother’s fright, he did not perceive it. He touched her body, which trembled, he felt the smoothness of her skin, he felt the warmth, her smell. He ran his hand over her belly, across the dark shadow beneath it, to the thigh, the knee, then back, to the breast, the neck. All his sensations condensed into one: the hot pulse of blood, the tension of the body yearning to explode, the absence of any thought, impetus, a feeling of flying, a feeling of falling and rising.

      In each person, in the most intense sexual spasm, there is a small spark that draws attention to the nature of the act in which he and some other person is present. In young Hudorovec this was absent. He was completely in the domain of sensation. After a brief trembling brought on by her son’s strange behaviour, his mother experienced a kind of spasm. The next cry that came from her throat was one of unknown joy. A strange heat washed over her, she held Janek’s body, which was no bigger than hers and very thin, and then she began to tear his shirt off, crying out and whispering strange words, as if hallucinating.

      ‘Don’t be scared, Janek … don’t be afraid … we all do this and you must, too … my heart would pain me if you didn’t … don’t be afraid … I’m your mother … I’ll show you how … you’ll see, you’ll see … ’ Suppressed gasps mingled with her words, as she stripped him completely with hungry hands. ‘You see, in here.’ She turned him towards her, locking him with her legs, grabbing his hair and wildly kissing his eyes. She raked her fingers across him, all the while gasping, panting and whispering. At the beginning Janek only breathed deeply, but then strange sounds emerged from his throat, a strangled noise. He took hold of his mother’s hair and roughly pulled her towards him.

      ‘Ow, that hurts, Janek …’ she sighed. ‘But let it hurt, let it hurt … it’s nice if it hurts.’ Then he bit into the skin on her shoulder and she cried out in pain, he began to slap her, to beat her all over so that she was gasping. ‘Hit me, Janek … hit me … more … you’re a good boy, Janek … you must beat me, you must punish me, you must always beat me … till my dying breath I’d do anything for you … Janek … my son …’ Towards the end she wheezed, his spasm ended, he unclenched his fists, he lay on her body, then he rolled aside. He saw that she was bloody from his bites and mottled from the blows. He looked at his own body, his member, which seemed red in the moonlight. An association immediately flashed into his brain, as he remembered the red tongue of a panting dog by the stream.

      Then something snapped inside him. Thoughts rushed upon him. Through the bustle there trickled all that he had experienced, all that had stifled him. With all these dark feelings inside him, he turned to his mother’s bitten body, their nakedness. An image of his actions began to appear: he remembered he had beaten his mother … he felt dizzy, objects slipped away from him … his ears were filled with silence, he passed out.

      When he came to, he was lying beneath the cover on his own bed. His mother was leaning over him and dabbing his face with a wet cloth. She was dressed. Previous feelings overwhelmed him again. They choked him, then they flowed away, the dark mass shattered, and he began to sob, convulsively and silently. ‘Janek!’ she said, ‘you mustn’t cry. You must go to sleep. Then it’ll be all right. Everything’ll be all right!’ The sobbing became a long, inconsolable cry. His mother stroked his cheeks for a while and then she threw herself on the bed beside him and began to sob too. When they had no tears left, their bodies shook with silent convulsions. The spasms gradually became sparser.

      A coldness began to grow between them.

      Summer came, dry and windy. There was no rain; it seemed as if the countryside would burn up in the drought. Old Baranja deteriorated, his skin turned yellow and limp, he was shrivelling into a skeleton. He spoke to no one, he hid in his house and no one saw him the whole week. Sometimes he could be heard cursing, throwing things at the wall and choking as he coughed. It seemed as if he could pass away at any minute, but Baranja fought back. In the evening, when the sun was no longer so fierce, he appeared once again in front of his house and lifelessly lingered on the threshold. He was no longer coughing so badly. Emma had to bring him schnapps. Whenever he sat outside, the bottle was beside him.

      In early July three gypsies came, two Horvats and a Šarkezi. They were tired and morose looking, they threw their wooden suitcases down in the corner and grimly said they had been let go. More soon followed. They began to sit around in front of their houses; the settlement began to change into a mortuary. School kids started wandering around the villages all day as the school year had ended. The sun on the dried-out front yards was dazzling. Even in the shade of the trees it was insufferably hot. No one spoke, the gypsies moved slowly and lazily, sleeping most of the time, and even the dogs no longer barked, but lay around, tongues lolling. People were overcome by a dull lethargy. They spoke with great difficulty and hoarsely, opening their mouths only when it was unavoidable, and then only half way.

      During the day Janek did not hang around the settlement. He suddenly had the feeling that a stench of dirt, sweat and inertia was coming from the houses. The smell was nothing new, he had smelt it before, but now it began to disturb him, to make him feel nauseous. Beneath the hot sun the smell was particularly intolerable, it hung in the air among the trees and made it difficult to breathe. Maybe the smell was also an excuse, since he did not want to linger. Maybe he dared not admit to himself that he was being driven from the settlement by something else, a kind of fear that he would speak to someone, that he would make eye contact with someone, for he was filled with what felt like guilt and beneath the hot sun among the buildings that feeling was very strong, insupportable.

      If