A Swarm of Dust Read online

  The only solution lay with her. Ever since they first met the solution was with her. Only with her. They met at a New Year’s party: the whole university was celebrating. He wasn’t sure what took him there … perhaps the anxiety he felt in the attic room was bothering him enough to send him outside … he wandered the streets for some time, convinced that their abandoned chill would lift the burden from his body. But the anxiety did not go away. He wanted to sit in the middle of the crowd on his own, drink a bit, reflect and watch all the excitement without completely opening his eyes, hoping that it would all float before him … so he went there … and sat there for some time, feeling okay in the swarm of people that did not touch him. Then that fat female professor appeared. As if she’d fallen from the sky she stood before him: ‘Come and dance, Hudorovec. Oh come on, of course you know how to dance … if not, I’ll teach you … ’

  His hand flew out and he hit her face, feeling joy as he did so. The woman flushed, she stamped her foot so hard that her bottom quivered, spat in his face and growled ‘Stinking gypsy’. Then his hand once more flew through the air and he hit her again, so hard that she staggered. Again, he had a good feeling, but different from before … people were looking now … the woman vanished and he sat there, looking absently into space.

  Exactly when she appeared he didn’t remember, he just saw a silhouette, felt a movement, cigarette smoke: evidently she had offered him a cigarette.

  ‘I’m sure I deserve a slap, just like the professor,’ she said. ‘I’m harassing you, like she did. But you’re thinking, you’re on your own and don’t want to be disturbed when you’re alone. That’s why you came here, I noticed immediately: to be alone among this crowd. I watched you. You were walking beneath the window. I was up here on my own and looked out. Of course, my isolation and yours have nothing in common. I have the feeling that outside you weren’t so alone, that someone was bothering you, pestering you. I’d even go so far as to say it was you. You from the past, different, but present. And to find some distance from yourself you came into this crowd, like me … Here everything is moving, floating, you can’t feel your body, it flows into this light and moves you … So I understand why you hit her. I’d understand it if you hit me, but please don’t. I’m like you, the past hangs on me, too, I can’t escape from it.’

  She was beautiful: tiny, but beautiful. She smoked nervously, but there was a strange peace in her eyes. When he looked at her he felt satisfied. He didn’t know why. He felt he had won some kind of victory, that something nice had happened. He was normally afraid of women, especially if they were beautiful, but this one was different. First of all, it did not surprise him that she was excusing something that others thought unacceptable. She was speaking to him simply and without emphasis, as if they’d known each other for a long time. She wasn’t looking at him inquisitively, like other women, she was not fluttering her eyelashes to get his attention, she was not saying she had never seen such a handsome face, that he had fine features – like an Indian prince if he’d worn a turban – she didn’t allude to him being a gypsy, that he must be temperamental. She did nothing that other female students had done when they met. She was speaking about something else altogether and with no trace of a hidden agenda. She had made no mention at all of how he looked, as if she could not see his exterior, only what was inside and if she did mention some aspect of his appearance, it was in connection with some characteristic she ascribed to him.

  ‘Your face is unusual, striking. I’m sure you must have been ugly when you were younger, for somewhere behind your current expression lie those features and they even sometimes leap to the foreground. Some kind of suffering gave you a disguise. That disguise is good looks, people say, but there is hatred lurking beneath, violent hatred. That’s the impression I get. Your face is more frightening than handsome. It fills me with horror. Because it is cruel. Maybe that’s why women chase you. Have you thought of that? Do you feel hatred inside?’

  She was without the slightest trace of pushiness or falseness, she emitted an air only of simple obviousness, she emitted a pleasant coolness, an assuredness, determinability. He was drawn to her most of all because she explained his actions and his anxiety, she apologised for him to himself. She seemed the embodiment of perfection, the ultimate law of all things, the namer of all events and feelings. In the end he ran to her and needed her, he clung to her like a root to a riverbank. He entrusted her with what tormented him, his doubts and disharmony, and they confided in each other increasingly.

  ‘Origin and blood are not all that important,’ she convinced him. ‘A person is created by situations in which one has to react in a particular way. We are created by perceptions of moments. Since these situations are different for each one of us, we each have our own mentality. And the way we think is nothing more than a picture of the past. Grown-ups react in the way that the past has taught them to react. Inheritance plays a part only in the intensity of perceptions and reactions. So we could say that your forebears really are the reason for your excessive impulsiveness, but only if it can be proven that the instinctive side of the gypsy character really is so impetuous. Someone with less intense feelings who experienced what you did would be led in a different direction.’

  Imperceptibly, she saved him from solitude and ensured that in company he no longer felt so bad with her alongside him. They went to the theatre, concerts and libraries, then she graduated in psychology and got a job, and invited him to a celebration. ‘I see only one possibility for you to throw off the burden of the past,’ she said to him. ‘Because your reason has borders that do not extend as far as the important events of your childhood, you need to extend those borders. Only reason can help you. Only through reason can you extract yourself from the emotional confusion. Give up studying law – who the hell yoked you to that! You must have listened to the wrong advice. You won’t save yourself there … Law is pathetic dogma that deadens the mind rather than developing it. Leave the law and transfer to psychology. Here you’ll learn to think, conclude, recognise and demonstrate your feelings. Above all, you have to understand people, in other words yourself, only then can you reach for the scalpel of reason and cut out the thing inside you that drives you to despair and even perhaps to death. Don’t worry about your scholarship: if you lose it, I have a job and can help you – I can loan you the money and you will pay it back when you can. When you are used to defining and displaying your feelings, you will know how to dispose of the unpleasant ones.’

  He saw no deception or bad intentions in her proposal, but in spite of that he did not take her up on it right away. When they weighed things up, they realised that he would lose the two years of law study and it would be better if he stayed and just attended lectures in psychology.

  Then one evening she came again. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking and it strikes me that reason alone will not help you. It will push you even deeper. Although now it seems to offer a complete solution, I doubt that your mental make-up will allow you cold, clear thoughts that do not need an emotional basis to be reliable. There’s also the question of whether it is possible to fight with cold reason against mental deformity and whether reason can help in the confusion arising from the wrong perceptions of the past. Recently I’ve been experiencing a lot of doubt. It’s only now that I see that study has given me nothing but a heap of facts that I am misapplying. Maybe I’m wrong in everything I think about you. Even science can grab the wrong end of the stick and then all your findings prove false, even though logical. I think there should be a special psychology for each person, and that general theories and concepts of the human mind be used only as a signpost to self-deception. All of this increasingly convinces me that the most significant situations in which a person strays are during childhood. Situations that teach a person how to react. So in every case it is necessary to check a person’s past and identify the blade that scarred them – and then do something with that blade. Of course, you can’t get rid of the
causes, for a cause is a cause only when it has an effect and what is in the past often can’t be erased. In fact, can anything ever be erased? You need to break the chain of a person’s reactions and get him to act differently. But how? Perhaps by letting them reconstruct the event. Then there is the possibility that he will see something that he didn’t see before and react differently. I’m thinking about you. Your problem is women. Sexuality. The vagina. There’s only one way. Your strange behaviour, your loathing arises from a fear of sexuality. Why, I don’t know. So I suggest we try. We make love. Perhaps with me you’ll find that your fear, which you first experienced with your mother, is unjustified.’

  He couldn’t decide. She tried to convince him, but ultimately he had to decide for himself, and she didn’t want to lure him into anything in a roundabout way. She emphasised that it was only an experiment, to uncover the complex working of his mind. She began by removing her clothes in front of him. ‘You have to get used to naked women,’ she said. ‘A woman is nothing unusual, a person with a certain bodily construction that enables reproduction and the preservation of the species. But the bodily conjoining of man and woman is not only about reproduction, it is connected with pleasures that are the result of satisfying an urge. In other words, it is about the free play of two members of the opposite sex who find satisfaction in their game. Animals have similar urges.’

  That’s what she said to him.

  ‘Normally, close blood relatives do not come together physically because children produced in that way are often physically and mentally abnormal. In other words, nature has set boundaries for people, but of course that had no connection with anything, just as your relationship with your mother had not. It’s about seeing things through the eyes of a normal person. About getting rid of the fear of this action and learning to enjoy.’

  She spent whole afternoons at his place. As soon as she arrived she stripped naked and went about the room laying in various positions, read and talked to him, and the whole time he was forced to look at her nakedness. This lasted about a week and the agitation passed. He got used to it. In the movement of her body there was something calming, non-intrusive, self-evident. Then she said that he had to get used to his own body and to her seeing it. This was more difficult. But he had to take the first step so that the barriers could fall. They spent some afternoons sitting around the room looking at each other’s nakedness, while she explained the theory of sexual drive. Finally, she thought the time for intercourse had arrived.

  They did this on the couch and it was over quickly. He came after a few moments, withdrew from her, curled up in a corner and started to shake. ‘I can’t,’ he whispered. ‘I’d like to so much, but I get so agitated that I feel I’ll go crazy. This isn’t agitation because of the act itself, this is fear, horror. I think it bothers me that you’re not my mother. So far, I’ve only done it with her. And it was different there. I can’t explain it. I think I can only do it with my mother and although then I also feel fear, I feel safe in her arms. I feel she is protecting me.’

  She let him cry and he felt easier. ‘We won’t give up. The problem lies here, and it’s here we need to break the vicious circle. Once you have to persist until the end. Then we’d take a step forward. You’ve got to grit your teeth, you can’t give up.’

  The next time he tried, he tried to persist in the act, but he felt as if he was falling into a deep chasm; when he came, it brought no relief, he felt even more as if he was choking, he felt dizzy. They agreed that in future he would decide when to continue. Once again, they sat around the room naked.

  His legs were completely paralysed. Everything lay around him as in the dead of winter, like a waxwork museum. The upper part of his body was still alive, he could feel the blood flowing, the pulse in his forehead was like small blows, and he felt the will and the strength to move. He wanted to move. He stepped slowly and awkwardly, as if using crutches, feeling that only the upper part of his thighs were working, as if his legs were cut off. He didn’t know when his foot left the ground and was lowered again. He walked like a blind man, unsteadily.

  On the edge of the pavement, his strength failed him. Dark figures stood there, looking across the square, past the parked cars, over the fence towards the castle that hung in the distance like a silhouette. He couldn’t see them clearly, he discerned only their outlines to the left and right, behind him. Nor did he know exactly where they were looking, but he was looking in front of himself, across the parked vehicles and the outline of the castle; it never occurred to him that the others might be looking anywhere else. It seemed obvious that they could see only what he could see. He stood there and tried to lift his arm, to tear himself from his lethargy, for he felt as if he was turning to stone. Then, when he managed to lift his right arm a little, he became scared that he could be frozen in this pose, with his arm raised, like a statue, and he quickly lowered it. The whole time his hearing was inactive, and now his eyelids began to droop, as if he was sinking into sleep. But his mind was still working and dragging him back to wakefulness. He was floating in a tormented state: one moment he wanted to sink into sleep, the next to rouse himself.

  The worst thing was that the paralysis did not affect his thoughts, but his senses; his thoughts flew somewhere above him, as if torn from him. He could look upon his lifeless form, floating as if from a distance. He wanted to put an end to this tormented state, his thoughts beat against it, he wanted to tear it, but the process unfolded outside his awareness, within him but not within, outside and yet not outside. Such a state often assailed him before sleep, but not quite like that, only similarly, for in sleep thoughts sank and senses continued to function, whereas here the senses were dead and thoughts alive.

  And that time it was the same! When the question came, why Daria was doing this, with what intention, and why he was submitting to her without resistance? She was at his place, it was raining outside, the light on the wall was murky. He moved quickly to the couch, grabbed her by the shoulders, startling her.

  ‘Daria!’ he croaked. He stared at the outline of her features through the dusk. ‘Why are you doing this? What am I to you? Why do I matter? What’s your intention? Why do you want me to have a different attitude to sex?’

  She did not reply. She sat up, threw back the cover, reached for her clothes and began to get dressed. ‘I’m going,’ she said. He watched her movements. When she was ready, she opened the door.

  ‘Tell me!’ he almost shouted. ‘Tell me!’

  For some moments she simply stood in the doorway. He got the impression she wanted to see him clearly through the twilight. And then she said: ‘Your problem interests me. I’d like to find out if I’m wrong. I’m a psychologist.’

  Then she closed the door. He heard her footsteps on the steep staircase. The rain beneath the window was pattering evenly. He no longer saw even outlines. His head became so clear that the music from the radio somewhere down below screeched through him like an axe blade.

  Now he became aware that he was in the square, that there were people around him, but this awareness only increased the terrible sense of physical effort. After a period of time he could not have defined, the sense of floating began to abate. Then something strange happened: at one and the same time he sank into sleep and became conscious. Part of him was lost, distanced, but another part remained present and he could feel it with increasing intensity. And then a moment came when he felt nothing less than every single nerve. It seemed the world was inundating him or that he was growing into the world, for suddenly the world was no longer, there was only him. He could not discern his own dimensions or form, he felt only the pulsating of blood, the hardness of bones, his skeleton, muscles, flesh. He felt substance. He felt that he was that substance – a substance that felt itself as a substance. He remembered this with a flash a little later, when the world once more began to assail his senses, when he came together, when he again narrowed to a central point, whereas before he had extended on all sides and everything that
his senses now recognised as his surroundings were filled with bodily substance and nerves.

  Once again he stood there, his hand thawing, reaching with it into the air: the icy cold was gone, he was no longer afraid that his hand would go numb. Voices began to resound in his ears. He felt the wind on his neck. His eyes jumped from their sockets, they became light and smooth like oiled ball bearings, they leaped into the surroundings. The people standing close by were distinct, they were talking, some of them loudly. The more they had seemed petrified before, the sharper was their speech now. As if they were shouting at him and because of him. Their voices were varied, they reached his ears with different intonations. Some moments they were short, sharp and distinct, then they swarmed like waves of music, transformed into a confused murmuring that came from far off or almost thundered right beside him, like a collective prayer in church. And then silence fell.

  The professor pointed to a chair and rubbed his hands together as if cold. Then he sat behind the desk, picked up the student record book and leafed through it. ‘Well, well!’ he said with a nod, as if pleased with something. ‘Not bad! I’ve heard this and that about you. You’re very independent, impulsive. But from your grades, there’s no indication that you’re not intelligent … ’