A Swarm of Dust Read online

  ‘Fire!’

  And then again: ‘Fire! Klemar’s is on fire!’

  He rushed across fields and orchards. He tripped, rolling over on the lumpy earth. Then forward, to the trees, a copse. There he stopped, breathing heavily, fell on his knees, raking his hands through the cold, dewy grass and staring at the fire raging below him.

  There was a racket in the village, dogs were going wild and breaking free from their chains. People ran around, grabbing buckets and filling them on the way. Thick white smoke churned into the sky. At the upper end of the valley a siren could be heard, drawing quickly nearer. He heard a roof beam crack and collapse.

  He squatted there for a long time, watching.

  Then he got up and continued towards the top of the hill. He was breathing excitedly. He felt a lightness near his heart, a kind of wild joy flowing through his veins like blood. Something had arisen within him, he felt like shouting. The shout was already in his throat, but then he had an attack of fright. The shout broke. He walked faster.

  The voices of people shouting became more distant. He was nearing the top.

  There, above the young wood, where the hill ended, stood a large tree stump. He went over to it and looked round. The flames had already died down, only the glowing lines of the half-burned roof beams showed him where the fire was. There was still the sound of barking, but far away, barely audible.

  A refreshing chill bathed him. He leaned against the tree stump. The night was calming down. The mist shrouding the horizon to the south had dispersed. He could clearly see the shadow of the plain that flowed into the dark line of the horizon.

  Then it was night, through which distant moments percolated. The moon rose above the plain, rounded and criss-crossed with dark shadows, and with a misty halo around it. On the edge of the wood he felt a pine tree, climbed its trunk, ran his hands over the bark. How rough it was in comparison with a beech, which was so smooth. And the meadows by the stream were silvery grey, weren’t they? And this landscape, light and dark shadows, outlines, sharply bordered. And the night chill, splashing with the wind, horizontally, the dew rising into the air, the dewy grass. The outlines were sharp, very sharp, as if drawn in by an invisible marker. And the different hues. Every object was a different shade in the yellowish light. That was the moon, the golden moon! The meadow was pale, the wood darker, sharper. The greyish trunks, standing in line. Like a fence. He turned around. Those stars, that sand, that dust, who scattered it? And he turned again. The ranks of alders by the stream, the water pattering along the stream bed like water in a gutter …

  When rain strikes a windowpane the sound is frightening. The same when it hits your face. Then you are washed, it runs over you, bites into your skin, it does not rattle, but it is damp, it smells of rain, a special, smoky smell; you reach out your hand into the rainy air, then stretch it out in front of you, a fluttering curtain, through it chimneys can hazily be seen and if you take hold of the wall it is hard, you can touch it, it’s rough like bark, everything is rough; you have to lean your chest against it, then it is rough and wet, and the ground is rough; there’s no real smoothness, it doesn’t exist; surfaces, too, are rough … bring me a little water from the stream and pour it over me … you pour it and rub it in, you see and touch the smoothness, but you feel roughness, a negligible roughness … a little water in your hands … that hollowness, how it sounds as if it is coming from somewhere foggy, voices also retain a touch of roughness, especially if they come from the past; does time really fly past, the time that is no more? … To touch and to be distant, it’s not good to be distant, that’s no help, you can touch only from close up, bark for instance, and of course you don’t touch a voice, but how it washes up from the past, it has to come in some way, there must be some connection … There’s something else that needs to be done.

  Geder’s light is on …

  He’s still up.

  What’s he doing? Reading strange books, planing some wood. Lately, he has given up washing altogether. Daria always smelled of soap. In fact, there was a bad smell across the whole valley. When there were storms there was a pungent smell that tickled the throat. Here they don’t bathe, sleeping and working in the same shirt for a month or more. Sweat. Geder’s lights are on. Why is he up so late every night … his yard is littered with rubbish …

  Will he hear knocking?

  This room! It’s colder than outside. The windows are small and dirty, the sun doesn’t penetrate. How is that man living? The same way year after year. It’s all still like it was when he was first here. An iron bed that still squeaks if you lean on it, but probably even more wobbly now. And the same green cover. There’s the dusty stove and inside, the same old pots and pans, he certainly doesn’t bake bread, he buys it at the baker’s, and on top of the stove all sorts of jumble, books, newspapers, shoes, pieces of wood, cobwebs in the corner. Janek had never noticed these things before, only when he returned from a more ordered world did he see what had been right in front of his eyes since childhood, but had not bothered him. Now it was as if he was seeing everything for the first time. Was it, then, possible to return to the past? Does the past exist?

  One of the small windows was ajar; he went closer and peeped inside. He saw Geder kneeling on the dirty floor by a wooden incubator.

  ‘Oh little yellow eggs!’ he was saying hoarsely. ‘They’ll be chickens! What am I saying? Turkeys!’ He reached towards a tray on the ground, picked up the glass and drained it. The tray held a bottle of schnapps. He put the glass back and wiped his mouth.

  ‘Brrr! Would you like a little schnapps, my chicky wickies? My little mousy wousies? Will you be out soon? Peck, peck, peck, out of the shell, here we are, cluck, cluck, cluck!’

  Janek knocked on the window. Geder started and looked round. Then he grabbed the tray and pushed it under the bed. He dusted off his knees and went to open the door. When he saw Janek he looked startled, but then he opened his arms wide.

  ‘There he is, our Janek Banek!’

  ‘I’ve come to visit you,’ said Janek drily.

  ‘Of course. You’ve been away for two years. Do you remember? You sat on this bed the day you left. As sad as a felled tree.’

  ‘Sad is the one who does the felling.’

  ‘You always said things that I only half understood. Come in.’

  He closed the door and led Janek to the main room.

  ‘You’re raising chickens?’ Janek gestured towards the incubator.

  ‘What about you, how are you?’

  ‘What about you, how are you?’ replied Janek.

  ‘I’ve discovered something damned devilish!’

  ‘That the chicken came before the egg?’

  ‘That it wasn’t my fault I was born!’

  ‘I hope the guilty one is safely behind bars!’ commented Janek.

  ‘I’m not joking, damn it! Look! This,’ he picked up a large wall clock from the table, ‘and this,’ he pulled a watch from his pocket, ‘opened my eyes. The wall clock worked the whole time. Best clock in the world. This pocket watch dilly-dallied, the bitch, so that I felt like stepping on it and passing out with pleasure when it crunched under foot. So I reached for the pocket watch once when I went into town. Of course, it had stopped. I looked at the wall clock, to set the pocket watch – and damn it, the wall clock showed half past ten and the pocket watch half past ten as well! But the pocket watch had stopped!’

  ‘It stopped at half past ten in the evening and you wanted to set it twenty-four hours later,’ Janek observed.

  ‘Good heavens, you’re a clever one! Two years studying and look what it’s made of you!’

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ replied Janek.

  ‘But listen: a week later and exactly the same thing happens! But at a different time. A quarter to twelve. And a few days ago exactly at twelve! Now I’m thinking: it’s happened three times in two weeks that I reach for my pocket watch twenty-four hours after it stopped!’ Janek was walking restlessly round the room. ‘Y
es, it happens, it happens.’

  ‘Wait a sec!’ Geder put his hand on his arm. ‘Yesterday I was rewinding my watch and it broke. Goodbye forever. But the wall clock, it stopped right at the same moment, exactly when I broke the pocket watch, all on its own!’

  ‘They had an agreement.’

  ‘Janek, I want you to be serious. Take this example. Charlemagne died in the year 814.’

  ‘And?’ said Janek with a shrug.

  ‘814 is the code for my bike lock.’

  ‘A historical conspiracy!’

  ‘What’s more, 814 is my house number!’

  ‘A geographical conspiracy!’

  ‘And last of all, and this is the real devil: 814 is my birth date. The 14th of the 8th. What do you say to that!’

  Janek walked round the room once more. ‘You’re becoming an oddball!’

  ‘You think it’s a joke? Let me show you something.’

  From beneath the bed he pulled a large piece of cardboard with an ovum drawn in the centre and around it a mass of sperm. ‘Look. This in the middle, you know what it is. And all around are the male whatnots that spurt from you when you do it with a woman. Millions of them. And of all these millions, only one fertilises the egg. Just one! And I wonder: how is it that from all these, it was me as I am that was made? Why aren’t I my brother and why isn’t my brother me?’

  ‘What about death, Geder?’

  For some time Geder stared in silence at the ovum on the cardboard. ‘What?’

  ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘I’m talking about life, Janek … Are you sick?’

  ‘Everything I see around me is sick. Everything I smell. Everything I can touch. Everything beyond the horizon and everything inside me, so close that it’s too close.’

  After a short pause he gave a sour smile. ‘Interesting, this student humour. By the way, did you know the Klemars’ house burned down?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘They say someone started a fire.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘And the priest’s niece, Polonka. Did you hear what happened?’

  ‘She got married?’

  ‘Someone raped her. She won’t say who. The priest sent her back to her parents, although she didn’t want to go because her stepfather was cruel to her. The train stopped on the bridge above the Mura. She opened the door and jumped into the river. Five hundred metres downstream they pulled her body out, drowned.’

  ‘Evidently she didn’t know how to swim,’ said Janek with a shrug.

  ‘You used to have more feeling for other people. Ljubljana has changed you.’

  ‘Why did your wife run off, Geder?’

  Geder took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling. ‘Janek, there are certain things I’d rather we didn’t talk about.’

  ‘The word in the parish is that you beat her on the naked arse with a cudgel.’

  ‘What they say in the parish is not worth two hoots.’

  ‘Some say that you can’t get it up anymore.’

  ‘Some are under the devil’s influence.’

  ‘Matajko claims that your thing was cut off when you were little.’

  ‘Matajko? A hundred years ago he’d have had to show me some respect!’

  ‘The parish doesn’t respect you.’

  ‘I respect the parish even less!’

  ‘You go around saying that farmers are manure.’

  ‘The more you dig it, the more it smells.’

  ‘The farmers say you are an even bigger shitheap. That your house is falling down around your ears.’

  ‘It’s still standing.’

  ‘That if you want to slaughter a pig you have to buy one, because you don’t have your own.’

  ‘No, because I’m not a farmer.’

  ‘Your fields are full of weeds.’

  ‘Those who say that are growing only nettles behind the shithouse!’

  ‘You go around unwashed, they say.’

  ‘And they bathe every day – in slurry!’

  ‘It seems they’d like to get rid of you.’

  ‘Janek! I’ll tell you this – may the devil strike me dead – I’m the most normal person in this parish! I’ve read books and I know all too damn well what the world is like. The priest – no offence – likes to spread fear from the pulpit. And you, too, are not without your oddities – again, no offence. It’s said that you and your mother – thank God the priest knows nothing about this – that you and your mother … ’

  Janek grabbed hold of a chair and raised it above Geder’s head.

  ‘Give me the chair,’ said Geder, unperturbed.

  ‘Never, ever let anything like that cross your tongue again!’

  ‘Give me the chair, Janek. I’m not accusing you of anything –’

  The door suddenly opened and Janek’s mother stood on the doorstep.

  ‘Holy mother of God!’ She opened her arms wide. ‘Janek!’ She erupted into hysterical tears and slid to her knees.

  Janek put the chair down and went over to her. ‘Are you spying on me?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

  ‘So why did you come?’ he raised his voice.

  She pointed at Geder. ‘I clean for him. He’s on his own.’

  ‘Poor thing!’

  ‘He wouldn’t give money for you otherwise,’ she said by way of apology.

  ‘He stopped giving money two years ago! Since then it’s the council.’

  ‘Yes, but he did before, for the grammar school … ’

  ‘Haven’t you paid off that small change after two years?’

  ‘But he’s got no one –’

  ‘What do you do for him?’ roared Janek. ‘Feed his frogs? His lizards? Wash his underpants? Sweep the chicken shit from the house?’

  Aranka bowed her head. ‘Oh, Janek … ’

  ‘Oh, Janek. Oh, Janek.’ He mocked her. He went over to Geder with a grin on his face. ‘Oh, Janek. Oh, Janek.’

  He let the door slam as he left. Outside, he stopped and eavesdropped at the slightly open window.

  ‘Lojz, you promised you wouldn’t quarrel with him!’ he heard his mother say.

  ‘Hold your tongue, woman,’ replied Geder edgily.

  ‘You must have said something to him to make him like that!’

  ‘Yes, that he’s whoring around with you, that’s what I said!’ snapped Geder.

  ‘Loooojz – ’

  ‘That’s not my name!’

  ‘Did you say anything about us?’

  ‘And what would I say about us?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘That we’ve both had you. That you cheated on him with me and on me with him? You gypsy whore. You robbed me blind. I paid for him, I fed you and him both – it’s surprising I’ve still got a shirt on my back! And all because you bewitched me, you went on your knees and said: “I’ll bear you a child, Lojz, I’ll bear you a son, Lojz” – damn the name – never call me that again! Never again! And what have you given me after five years! Fuck all!’

  ‘Loooojz –’

  ‘I’m not Lojz! From today I’m Geder to you. Geder! It’s over! I’m not a fool! And you’re fat. Fat and barren. All women are barren!’

  He fell to the floor beside the incubator and put his hands to his face.

  ‘I’ll wash your clothes,’ said Aranka calmly. ‘Or I’ll sweep up. It’s a bit of a mess. I’ll sweep up.’

  Geder said nothing. Aranka put down the basket that she had been holding the whole time, went into a side room, returned with a broom and began sweeping. From time to time she looked at Geder. He raised his head and looked at her. Then he went to her.

  ‘Aranka. I’m sorry. I’m not a violent man.’

  Aranka took hold of his sleeve. ‘Did you tell him about us?’

  ‘No,’ said Geder, shaking off her hand.

  ‘I was so afraid!’

  ‘But one thing is true, or the devil take me. In five years, nothing!’

  ‘What if it’
s not me … ’

  ‘Your son is fertile but he didn’t impregnate you! We’ve both spurted inside you and what has come of it?’

  ‘You’ve had so many women and it didn’t work with any of them … ’

  ‘Because they’re all barren!’ yelled Geder, turning and putting his head in his hands. His shoulders shook.

  Aranka reached out a hand to touch him, but at the last moment thought better of it. ‘Maybe soon … ’

  ‘Soon?’ said Geder angrily. ‘You want to steal more from me? Geder may be odd, but he’s no fool!’

  ‘Loooojz … ’

  ‘I know what I’m going to do! Find a real woman! One that isn’t a worthless piece of shit. One dripping from the eyes and mouth.’

  ‘Loooojz … ’

  Geder leaped towards her, snatched the broom from her, grabbed the basket and tried to pull it from her hands, then thought better of it, fell to his knees, reached under the bed, pulled out a crate of potatoes, poured some into the basket, shoved it into her hands and then pushed her towards the door.

  He pushed her outside and slammed the door. Aranka banged on it.

  ‘Lojz, please … ’

  She burst into hysterical tears.

  Geder stood on the other side of the door, his legs apart, like an animal getting ready for a fight.

  ‘I’ll jump on your stomach!’

  Concealed behind the woodshed against the wall beside the door, Janek could see both of them: Geder through the window and, in the semi-darkness, his mother before the door. Her crying decreased, she turned slowly and went into the darkness. Inside, Geder was pacing up and down. At one point, he went through a side door and reappeared with a white shirt and black boots. He took off his shirt, took a small bottle of eau de cologne from a drawer and rubbed it across his chest and under his arms. Then he sniffed his hands.