A Swarm of Dust Read online

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  THE AUTHOR

  THE TRANSLATOR

  Evald Flisar

  A SWARM OF DUST

  Translated from the Slovene by David Limon

  First published in 2018 by Istros Books

  London, United Kingdom www.istrosbooks.com

  First published in Slovenia by Sodobnost International as Greh (Sin), 2017

  Copyright © Evald Flisar, 2017

  The right of Evald Flisar, to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  Translation © David Limon, 2017

  David Limon has received a translation grant from the Slovenian Book Agency.

  Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak, www.frontispis.hr

  ISBN: 978-1-908236-38-8 (print edition)

  ISBN: 978-1-912545-09-4 (MOBI)

  ISBN: 978-1-912545-10-0 (ePub)

  Published with the financial assistance of Trubar Foundation, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

  PART ONE

  There was a full moon. Through the sparse branches of the pine trees it cast its light among the buildings. The meadows beside the stream were a silvery grey. The whole landscape had been transformed into sharp-edged patches of light and dark. Janek spent a long time crouching at the lower edge of the woods, despite the unpleasant night chill and the constant, unfathomable feeling that his surroundings were strange in some special way.

  He stared at the sky. Hints of thoughts flashed through his brain, but he was unable to connect them. This strange state had overcome him the moment that the landscape began to seem unusual and his eyes drank in the visible objects. His feelings dragged him along. He saw the silvery meadow in the valley and the dark track of alder by the stream. He knew that was what he was seeing, but that was all he knew, his mind was somehow distant. Normally when he saw meadows and a stream he thought about something, objects aroused different associations that were either whole or fragmented and scattered, but always thoughts and impressions found their way through. He would skip from grass to stream, to trees, to children chasing each other among the trees, to felling trees, to scooping water from the stream, and all these thoughts and impressions triggered associations that swarmed within him.

  Now the mental state of young Hudorovec was completely different. It happened just after he was struck by the unusual colour of the meadows. This halted the flow of associations that would at any moment have engulfed him and he focused entirely on the meadows and their appearance. He began to soak up this appearance, he began to soak up the colour and he felt the silvery colour was coming closer to him. He could sharply smell the night chill. It was the dampness coming from the valley, the damp earth, the damp grass, the dampness of the lazily flowing water, damp bark, leaves damp with dew, the dampness of the air.

  And he heard a fox yelping in the woods, he heard the gentle wind moving the leaves in the treetops, slowly flowing through them and making them tremble. He felt how the wind swept across the damp grass, shaking it slightly, how it licked the clods of earth in the fields, how it slightly ruffled the surface of the stream, how it caused the tiny scales on the tree bark to tremble a little, how it flowed through the air. He felt the ruffled coat of the fox and its hoarse call, he felt the mossy ground beneath its paws, he felt the stickiness of the fat, slippery footbridge across the stream and the solidness of the ground beneath him.

  He felt the expanse of the world, its hollowness, its extensiveness, he felt the distance of the sky above him and the closeness of the earth and its objects, he felt the form, the hardness and softness of substances and things, he sensed the tone of the sounds rushing to his ears. And he smelt all of this: he smelt the sap of the trees, the smell of the earth, the spruce needles, the brushwood, he smelt the smoke, he felt how the water in the stream smelled of mud and acorns, he smelt the warm plumage of birds, he smelt the wood close to him, his clothes, his skin, he smelt the stench from the woods, he smelt sweat.

  Behind him, in the settlement, a radio began to play. He knew that Pišta Baranja had a radio, but he did not know this as a thought, but rather felt it in a particular way, like the self-­evident fact that water is wet and that your hand will also be wet if you plunge it in. That the radio he could hear belonged to Pišta Baranja was alive in him like something for which there was no other explanation; something self-evident that touched the edge of awareness like a shadow, but a distinct shadow. And so he only heard the music coming from the radio; it did not draw him into any associations in connection with the music, the radio, the settlement. For him, the sounds were movements of matter and he grasped them in the same way he grasped the colour of the meadows, the stench of dirt, the rustling of the wind.

  Getting up and moving towards the settlement was a highly complex process of sensory perceptions and movements of matter. Perhaps the cold played the main role, but he could not say so with any certainty. Among the feelings bursting and splashing within him, the feeling of coldness was ever more frequent; after first appearing of its own accord, it then began to attach itself to others, it pierced him with a feeling of dampness – with a feeling of the wind, with a feeling of the stickiness of a tree trunk, with a feeling of the yellow light – and when a dog barked above him in the settlement it also awoke in him a feeling of coldness. The earth beneath him soon lost its hardness and roughness, and changed into a feeling of coldness. And when his stomach grumbled he felt his body, he felt its substance, he felt his posture, his stillness, he felt the possibility that he might move, he felt the pulse within him. In the veins on his neck his blood pulsed, and he felt how it flowed and at the same time felt how coldness flowed through him. He got up and went towards the buildings.

  Of course, it wasn’t that simple, for when someone who has been sitting motionless suddenly moves it is likely that some idea came upon him and triggered the desire for movement. And when someone feels cold, it is natural to be aware of this and to think: it’s cold, better get moving. This didn’t happen in the case of Janek Hudorovec, since he didn’t move with any intention. Wave a stick at a dog and he will jump, offer a bunch of hay to a cow and it will move towards you, frighten a wolf and you should flee, for it will leap at your throat! Perhaps Janek Hudorovec instinctively retreated from the coldness, just as an animal drags itself towards a fire or its den. He acted under some kind of delusion, but in spite of this everything remained clear: objects and his perception of them. In the same way that he had felt cold, he now felt warmth, flowing beneath the bed cover.

  He was not aware of time, but when his mother entered the house he saw that the moon was still shining through the small window, illuminating part of the wall and floor, but not his bed, which was in darkness. His mother put down the basket in which she had just brought the potatoes, flour and bread that she brought every evening. Then she went to her bed, which was lit by the moon, knelt down, turned back the cover and with her right hand straightened the pillow. Then she took the basin that was leaning against the wall by the door and put it on the wooden bench. There was a slight metallic noise as she did so. Then the sound of water being poured from a jug. The moon shone on her and the corner where she was standing. She reached for her belt, unfastened buttons and began to undress. She hung her clothes on a nail hammered into the wooden wall; then she began to splash herself with water and wash her naked body. Janek could see her clearly, but now his mother’s naked body filled him with no more feeling than had the silvery meadow or the outline of the trees. He perceived her body as substance.

  The scent of soap reached him, he heard rubbing as his mother washed her feet. She lifted one and stood on the other. He saw her
large breasts shaking, he saw the roundness of her belly shining, and 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 he was not lying in the grass down by the stream, he was wandering through the woods, which in that hot summer were unusually quiet. Sometimes he was lured far away, across the valley and into the hills on the eastern side, even straying onto the lowland. Now and then he sat on some rotting tree stump to rest and then he was driven on again aimlessly, he stopped by streams and watched them, he looked at the trees and touched their crusty trunks; sometimes he scared a hare out of the bushes, which went crashing into the woods, another time a whole column of deer passed by. He cooled down and quenched his thirst at forest springs. Whenever he came to the edge of the trees, he stopped and looked at the landscape before him, then turned and went back. He did not walk across fields, orchards or meadows, he kept to the woods where he was seen by no one, where he felt alone with the damp silence and the sappy smell of wood.

  During this wandering, the feeling of anxiety was not so intense, it became a deadness, a laziness of the arteries, a numbness of body and mind. Thoughts flowed idly through him, like the forest streams running among the dry grass. This numbness lasted quite some time, but now and then it was interrupted by sudden outbursts of sharp and unfamiliar feelings. Sometimes he was overwhelmed by an undermining fear and he did not know its source, nor did he even try to work it out, but rather succumbed to it with a trembling sense of enjoyment. Other times he was overcome by a shrill sense of joy. He would roll on the moss, run his hands over tree bark, hug their trunks, leap around and yell, and then chase the echo from the woods. But in a moment it all vanished, as in a whirlpool, and then everything flowed back to its former lethargy, to the dead decanting of thoughts, to the endless wandering through the woods.