A world with no people

“Imagine a world that only had slimy things in it. Imagine a world made of rainbows. Imagine a world with no people.”

“What would happen if people disappeared from the world, mummy?” That’s Emilka, the elder.

“Everything would be happy. The plants and animals and the whole Earth would heave a sigh of relief and start to heal,” I said.

“So it’s people’s responsibility to go away,” said Franci. She’s my younger daughter. She has moments like this, flashes of insight that arrive between laughter and tears.

Life is a wave, she said recently. And now, again: So it’s people’s responsibility to go away.

A brass band began to play in the village. A slow trumpeting resounded through the valley, maybe a wedding, maybe a funeral. Probably a funeral.

We joined hands and crossed the bridge over the little River Trnavka, then walked around the priory fishpond, past the hundred-year-old oak tree, along the dogleg up to the cemetery. We caught sight of the tail end of the funeral procession as it turned into the main gate.

It was around four in the afternoon, August, hot. As in that Seifert poem, “Musicians, sweat on their brows, empty their trumpets of spittle.”

There were four musicians, one of them a woman. They remained standing among the gravestones, some two hundred metres from the freshly dug grave, resting as they waited until the burial ceremony was over.

A single glance is enough to take in the cemetery in the village where my father had spent his summer holidays. We – my sister and I – had spent ours there too, and now our children were here, for theirs. A chapel stands in the centre, surrounded by a whitewashed wall, which is interrupted in one corner by a six-sided Baroque charnel house. I can put a face to some of the names on the gravestones: Mrs Rokoská was the sales assistant in the stationery shop; Mr Holoubek was the butcher; Mrťka Bolech – a glazier. We used to get potatoes from these people, and eggs from those. It’s not like Olšany Cemetery in Prague, where my relatives were laid to rest, and where I don’t know anyone else.

The cemetery of my childhood. It stands on a gentle slope, and there’s an open grave in the bottom left-hand corner.

The musicians lift their instruments to their mouths again, and four men from the undertaker’s lower the coffin into the hole. The family members step forward, one after the other. They shovel up some earth and throw it in. Some of the women are crying.

The queue of mourners is long, extending as far as us; the children want to join it, but I refuse. I cannot pretend that I knew the deceased, or press the hands of the relatives – there are at least fifteen – standing huddled to the left of the grave. The guests approach them from the right to offer their condolences; the black snake slowly inches forward. It’s late afternoon, too early for the heat to have mellowed, and the sun inconsiderately shines on the withered complexions, wrinkles, eye-bags, worn-down shoes, and dandruff dusting black, mothball-impregnated shoulders. The brass band has switched from hymns to patriotic songs: Bohemia the beautiful, Bohemia mine. That little Czech song of ours.

Outside the cemetery gate, a bus waits for the mourners, to take them to the pub. It’s a large, ceremonial funeral and the locals will talk about it for weeks to come.

During my childhood, burials took place almost in secret; people were afraid. They lied and stole too, but only furtively. However, twenty-five years have now passed since the fall of the Communist regime and at least some traditions have obviously and successfully been revived. Even the church is full every Sunday; rural people have regained the concept of a human society founded on shared values. Another thing is associated with this, though: outsiders are not welcome! The world can burn if it wishes, but far away from here.

The last guests shake hands with the bereaved family, who can finally leave. We hear the bus engine starting up. At long last, we can approach the grave. “Eliška Válová of Brtná” is written on the gravestone in fresh gold letters.

I know Brtná. Two side roads branch off the main road to Červená Řečice, and the more uneven of the two climbs the hill between grazing pastures that, if I am not mistaken, belong to the deceased lady’s family. As do hectares of fields in which mainly potatoes are grown. Potatoes have always been grown around Brtná, and the locals used to sell them on the black market even under Communism.

Under the gravestone gapes a deep hole; the coffin at the bottom is only half sprinkled with dry soil and flowers. The grave walls are covered with a sparkly purple fabric decorated with gold tassels. The heap of dug-up earth is also neatly hidden under a wooden plank, as if there were something obscene in the sight of naked loam. The wreaths are laid around the hole so you can read the inscriptions on the ribbons.

A decorative metal cross lies on the shiny lid of the pale wooden coffin. Maybe it isn’t actually metal, but a glance isn’t enough to be sure of this.

“That’s a sumptuous grave,” says the smaller girl. “Look at those tassles.”

“Can we see the lady?” That’s the older one. She likes to get to the root of things.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Eliška Válová of Brtná is enclosed in the coffin at the bottom of the grave. She’s been escorted out of the society of the living, who wept over her, then went to the pub, leaving her here in a quiet corner of the cemetery.

So much clamour and hustle and bustle around her, yet all of a sudden, here she is, entirely abandoned. We feel sorry for her. We’ll keep her company for a while.

My grannies and grandpas, who were none of them believers, were cremated after they died. For my great-grandparents, there was also a political dimension to cremation: it was a symbol of a modern, hygienically managed state, cleansed of the obscurantism that died with the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. No quiet corners. A last tug at the curtains, then the coffin travelled through the trapdoor beneath the podium and joined the queue. If only there’d at least been singing and music, a pyre built by hand, the stink of a burning body covered by the scent of aromatic woods, and ash getting into your hair and eyes, like it does in India, before possibly ending up in the River Ganges. Being merely swept up into a heap was all that awaited my ancestors, their bones mingled with remnants of bones burnt before theirs, and then an urn. As if the dead human body was rubbish that must be cleaned up as quickly as possible.

It’s been two weeks now since I stood by the sun-baked wall, looking at another inscription carved into stone, a woman’s name and surname, and dates of birth and death separated by almost one hundred years. The afternoon silence of the cemetery and the sun on my back.

It took me quite a long time to find her.

I’d stolen out, quietly, so I didn’t awaken my still-sleeping husband and children, from our rented flat in the old port city in southern Dalmatia, then I stood at the bus stop by the market to wait for a bus that would take me to the cemetery. However, I was waiting on the wrong side of the road, and while I was quietly drinking coffee from a plastic cup, my bus departed. I crossed the street and another half-hour went by. The sun climbed quickly in the sky and started to beat down. It was late July.

When, finally, another bus arrived, several old people clutching bunches of flowers got on with me. We travelled past the flat where my husband and children were probably having breakfast now, and then we climbed the winding road up the hill, to her neighbourhood. I picked out some familiar places. The coffee shop on the corner, the cashpoint where my ex-husband used to withdraw money when he wanted to give his mother a little extra. The monastery with the little church of white stone where she always went to pray to St Anthony. More locals got onto the bus. They knew each other, exchanged comments, teased each other. At one point the entire bus burst into laughter.

“Even you,” I mentally addressed my ex, “even you turned everything into a scene. You were always looking around to see who was watching, who was applauding you; you couldn’t buy a single item without flourishes and commotion. Sometimes I was ashamed of you. But that’s normal here in Dalmatia, everything is blown out of proportion, everything is exaggerated and there’s an adage for every situation. I knew a few of them at the time, but I’ve forgotten, it’s been years since we were together, since the last time we were together in this harbour town to visit your mother, who was still alive back then. We’d driven down to show her our son. Now I’m here with my new family, a stone’s throw away, returning home from the holidays. Our son isn’t here with us, otherwise I’d be taking him with me to the cemetery too.”

The bus went past her street, her house with the balcony that always used to be full of flowers, where she used to wave to us when we were leaving. Every year I was afraid that it would be the last time, but it wasn’t; she lived another four years after we split up.

Clusters of forgotten nursery rhymes suddenly burst into bloom in my head, and I felt like shouting them aloud: Udarili su paklene vrućine, duži su jaja od kurčine. A hellish heatwave has hit us, longer than a huge cock’s bollocks.[1] That would make the sun-dried seniors in their Sunday best sit up and stare!

The burial ground covered the entire hilltop, with an avenue of plane trees leading up to the entrance. On a bench by the main gate sat three men, carefully monitoring the comings and goings. They’d probably taken on the job of graveyard guards on their own initiative. The cemetery was shady and quiet, and they felt important; this wasn’t a bad way of spending a Sunday morning.

“Good morning. Do you know where I can find area P?”

“Who are you looking for there?”

I gave her name. They shook their heads; it didn’t mean anything to them. “Go straight ahead, then keep going straight ahead after the bend, then turn right.”

The main path, in the shade of the plane trees, circumscribed the hill’s natural surface and in one place had to bypass a relatively large rock sticking out of the earth. That would seem to be the bend. I panicked when I got a little way beyond it. I felt that I had been walking for too long. I must be going in the wrong direction.

“Can I help you?”

The man who addressed me was drawing a handcart and broom behind him; the cemetery is cleaned even on Sundays. He was young and tall, and tilted to one side. He was looking at me with ravenous eyes while wearing an idiotic smile.

“I’m looking for area P. I must have gone past it.”

“No, it’s there,” he said, waving his arm vaguely in front of him. “Come on, I’ll take you there.”

“No, no, I can find it on my own.”

“I’m going that way anyway,” he insisted.

“But I’d prefer to go alone.”

The elderly men and women that the bus had disgorged at the terminus along with me had long ago scattered to their own dead and we were now standing in a completely deserted part of the cemetery. Excitement trembled among the graves. The southern sun arouses lust, and if you’re alive, you’re doubly so when you’re among the dead.

I ran away from the road-sweeper and of course didn’t watch where I was going as I did, so I turned right too soon and reached the wall around the edge. I followed the labyrinthine tracks back to the main path – where he was already waiting for me.

“I’ll show you the way.”

I had no choice but to let him, though he really did lead me to the fork in the path with a sign bearing the letter P, where we said goodbye.

A wall on my right hand, and she the third in the wall. Her name, carved.

You always told me that it’s like a cosy little nook in there. It’s dry and clean, apparently; for decades, no dust has settled on the coffins of your father and uncle, who are there with her. You always said that it was an almost heavenly sensation laying her to rest here, in this raised space with a view of the blue limestone mountains that are currently shimmering in the overheated air as if they were under water. And then her flat. Clearing out her flat!

Tears sprang to my eyes. I closed them, and leant my forehead onto the hot stone.

Breaking up her household meant letting her truly, definitively die.

Her little curtains. The crisp marital bed in which she didn’t sleep, using the pallet by the wall instead. Her wardrobe full of assembled laundry, petticoats she never wore, towels she’d had as a young bride, and soaps. The wardrobe she was so proud of that she took me into the bedroom during every visit so she could open it in front of me. The wedding photo above the bed had been colourised and retouched; the bride with a bouquet of orange blossom showed her little teeth between her pink-tinted lips.

Her kitchen. Small and windowless, originally the pantry, where water and gas pipes had been installed. A sink, cupboards and a gas stove, with a set of saucepans she could cook anything in. The living room. On the left, a glass-fronted cabinet with a collection of porcelain figures (including one little angel from Prague that I gave her; I wonder where it ended up?) and an exhibition of postcards and the best wine glasses. A dark-brown velvety couch covered with the lacy blankets she crocheted herself. And on the wall, the mechanical clock that her husband had brought her from some long-ago voyage overseas.

Her pantry and caches of supplies that she would obtain from relatives on her native island and share between her three sons: oil, honey, capers and rakija, dried sage and walnuts. She always had stocks of home-made wine; she drank a watered-down glass after every meal.

When I knew her, she was eighty-five and still refusing suitors. At home, she wore a slip with lacy straps and a gathered skirt; she twisted her long silver hair into two braids that she wound around her head and pinned in place. She started to grow weaker only after her ninetieth birthday. She became afraid of accidents and stopped going out, but she still cooked for herself and did her own cleaning, crocheted lace and boasted that life was better than it ever had been before.

Then she started to go deaf, her sight deteriorated and she would complain about being on her own. She was afraid, particularly at night, and lonely. She would pray that God would take her, and she became ever angrier with her dead husband for everything he’d done to her when alive.

Her laughter. The way she used to rest her hand on the tablecloth and bend her head as her eyes flashed at me. Just a daughter-in-law, after all. Very young. From somewhere else.

Do you love him?

I do.

So make sure you get used to each other, and be together.

And son, don’t you shout. Do you hear me? Don’t shout.

I was extremely fond of her, regardless of the two of us. I loved her for the order that she lived in and because she didn’t let herself be upset, not by anything.

I opened my eyes. Two metal vases were attached to the gravestone, one on each side, clean and empty, as if neither of them had ever held any flowers. My ex-husband’s oldest brother and his family live somewhere in this city. They took care of his mother until she died; maybe she didn’t leave them enough for them to visit her grave.

I set out back towards the main path, then to the entrance, where I’d spotted a florist’s. The road-sweeper was nowhere to be seen, but the three guardian spirits on the bench waved at me.

“How did you get on?”

“Fine. I need to buy some flowers.”

“Don’t buy them in the shops, they’re overpriced. But there’s a woman here, hang on, I’ll show you.”

He stood up and led me away.

It was some sort of strawflower, but at least the sun wouldn’t scorch it immediately. I paid the woman fifteen kuna and hurried back to the grave. The bus was departing in half an hour. The flowers were purple, in a huge bunch, enough to fill both vases.

“Here you are, you see? I brought you some flowers, so it’s prettier now, for Sunday.”

I spoke aloud, and I wept. I was comforting her like an abandoned child, yet I was the one who actually needed consolation.

I closed my eyes for one last time, to visualise her. But the only thing in front of me was the warm darkness and within it the touch of something kind, compressed into the silence between the gravestone and me, into the light at my back. A bird cawed somewhere in that light, one of the small southern crows.

I had to go. I tore myself away from her grave as if I were tearing myself out of her arms.

The children pull at my hands. Can we go? They’re already getting bored of the grave. We leave the cemetery through the gate with the wrought-iron skulls.

We chatter on the way home.

“Those gold tassels were beautiful,” the younger one recalls, “I’d like ones like that, like a princess. And such beautiful flowers.”

The elder suddenly bursts into tears: “I don’t want you to die! Make sure you don’t die, mummy!”

No, darling, of course I won’t.

 

*

 

 

I wish for you for the second time

The church’s former sacristy houses a small museum, the walls hung with pictures of sailing ships and fishing boats buffeted by the waves or attacked by pirates, and dedicated to the Virgin Mary by the grateful sailors she’d saved. However, the jewel of the collection is a tapestry.

On a pale-blue background scattered with tiny flowers float the heads of the Mother of God and the baby Jesus, along with a burning heart that seems to hang from a fishing-rod. The heads are surrounded and supported by cherubs, themselves encircled with flowers, and the tapestry is surmounted by a large royal crown. Mary, the baby Jesus and the angels all have the same hair colour: pale blond, almost ashy.

The hair is real, says the guide. It belonged to the woman who reputedly worked on this tapestry for a whole twenty-five years, while waiting for her husband to come home from the sea. As you can see, she slowly went grey over time.

The guide, a shapely woman with a ponytail, resembling a young mare stuffed into a striped dress and white trainers, doesn’t know much about it. Instead, she’s betting on a personal approach. In the Church of Our Lady of the Rocks, which is a true artistic gem, she will for example tell us that she got married here, years ago. She doesn’t even mention the name of the woman who made the tapestry, Jacinta Kunić-Mijović, even though it’s written under the tapestry, as is the year in which she completed her work: 1828. She has no idea whether the husband ever returned. She believes he did. Otherwise it would be, as she says, “a very sad story”.

But most stories are sad, sweetheart, even if it doesn’t seem so from the perspective of a strapping body in a stripy dress.

Of course her husband didn’t return from his voyage. Jacinta went grey and died without ever seeing again the beloved cheeks that had been eaten long ago by the fish and crabs somewhere on the seabed.

Her longing is woven with coloured thread into the pale Japanese silk that her husband brought her from one of his first journeys. Hair she combed out over the years. Jacinta herself, her entire warm, female body is woven into her waiting. How well I understand this small, patient work, a prayer directed at the loved one, a tangible prayer that carried her through time, as if she were sailing on the sea. How well I understand this need to give a material form to her longing!

The sun rises, and Jacinta opens the shutters overlooking the sea. She’ll close them again in the evening. She spends day after day embroidering, possibly unless she’s ill; she looks forward to the work that awaits her. Equable, desperate, faithful, doubting Jacinta, who embraces her absent husband night after night, until suddenly he stops embracing her. And then the darkest of nights will fall, and there’s nowhere else to go. The fire within her kept him alive, showed him the way.

I, too, would prefer to do the sewing. A pillow under my beloved’s head instead of words. I would be grateful for any patient, delicate work with a visible result that would fill the time without you. For the effort that would take me forwards, moving me in the direction of our meeting.

In the church, behind the Baroque altar bearing the miraculous icon of the Virgin, there is a narrow aisle that can barely fit one person. The back of the altar consists of a smooth wall, where there is a hole about a metre above the ground, through which you can touch the original stone. The story goes that, on 22 July 1452, fishermen from the little town of Perast discovered the miraculous image on the rock. Nobody knows how it got there.

So they built an artificial island around the rock, sinking over a hundred old ships laden with stones to do so, and on that little island they built this church.

You can put your hand into the hole and make a wish. I can’t find it on my first attempt. So I silently express my wish as I press my head against the wall, probably at the same height as the image. I like it behind the altar; it’s solitary, and quiet. I’d absolutely love to stay here. But other people are awaiting miracles, so I need to come out fast, and then go back in again, because apparently wishes must be spoken aloud, fairly and squarely.

So back into the crevice I go, and quickly. This time, D. comes with me; apparently to show me where the secret hole is concealed. He takes my hand in his and guides it into a trough that is deep, warm inside and smoothed by many hands.

The date is 22 July 2024. I wish for you for the second time.

D., a publisher, is behaving chivalrously. He expresses interest about me as an individual, and he takes every opportunity to indicate that there could be something more between us, or that he wants something more.

After yesterday’s official festival launch ceremony and subsequent party, we went swimming in the sea at around two in the morning, T. the translator, D. the publisher, and me. The full moon on the sea’s surface tiled our way with silver, like in one of my ancient stories, one of the first, which I wrote after re-encountering the Adriatic Sea. For which, as I only gradually realised and am still realising, I hadn’t stopped yearning since the age of ten, when my parents got an exit visa for Yugoslavia for the first and last time.

My first great love, my first child, and also my first book, I told D. and T., as we sat and smoked, post-swim, on the still-warm low wall, was obviously the result of this childhood enchantment. My first husband was from Dalmatia, and I returned with him to the lost paradise of my youth.

For D., too, meeting the sea had been a defining moment, he said, he’d always longed for it, but he’d seen it for the first time at the age of twenty-two, right here, in this little town. He’d got the bus here from Belgrade with his first girlfriend, they’d arrived early in the morning, the girl was still asleep, but he woke up and saw the sea, that’s the sea, so that is the sea, then, he told himself, full of emotion. The sun was rising.

As I understand it – and I think I understand it correctly – his attempt to seduce me is part of his duties as host. If he didn’t try, I might be offended.

Attempting to seduce me is expected of him, and not being seduced is expected of me. And if I were to give in, it would make a better story, I’d become another notch on the bedpost, maybe one of those he even remembers for a while, who has a face and a name, but is nonetheless nothing more than a notch. In the end, what is important is not to actually seduce me – which would be practically impossible, from the organisational perspective – but to arouse, in me and in others, the impression that it might happen. Meanwhile everything goes on smoothly, good-naturedly. The light quivering on the surface, a man’s arm around my shoulders. A whisper in my ear: it’s not good to be alone beside the sea.

We leave the island and the tiny church and slip back into the little town of Perast by motorboat. We walk along the waterfront in the late morning heat. The scent of the sea is strongest in the places where rocks draped in seaweed poke out above the surface.

My love, I think, and everything within me stands quietly in the blazing heat and everything hurts, everything blooms. Oh, my love.

And aloud, I say to D, who is beside me: I wonder what T. is doing now? It’s a shame she didn’t come with us. She’s missing out on the best things in life.

D. waves his hand. I know T., and that’s what she’s like. She sleeps during the day and works at night.

When we were saying goodbye, at around three a.m., T. had asked us to let her sleep in the morning; she wouldn’t come on the trip. She’s allergic to the sun and she doesn’t feel like going anywhere anyway. Instead, she tried to tempt us to go and investigate a nearby petrol station, which is apparently open and selling alcohol.

We refused. D. and I were looking forward to the trip.

This is my only day by the sea this year, I said, I can’t let self-indulgence spoil it.

We walk past the Venetian-style palace façades; one of the palaces now houses a museum. There’s a Baroque church with a Venetian lion over the façade and a narrow campanile overgrown with clusters of caper bushes.

There must be a gorgeous view of the bay from up there, I say to D. Will you climb up with me?

D. looks disconcerted; his chivalry has its limits. The festival’s main organiser, who invited us on this trip, talks us out of climbing the tower too. There isn’t enough time, apparently. We’re going for lunch now, and we have to head back by half-past one.

Maybe after lunch, if there’s time?

The Czech woman is crazy, they’re both thinking. Going up a church tower in the noonday heat?!

Maybe to lessen my disappointment, D. quietly says: It’s a winding staircase, very narrow, for one person only. We’d have to go one after the other. Would you go ahead of me, or behind me?

Is it important?

Yes, it is.

The heat intensifies. We’re sitting at a restaurant table above the surface of the sea, under a canvas roof. A gentle breeze is blowing, and the bay, full of light and blue, enclosed by mountains, is entirely in motion; brightly coloured boats and yachts flicker over the waves and between the islets. The image is sharp, plastic; I recall a long-ago dream in which I spent a long time observing a busy Venetian canal with immense pleasure. Silence steals in between the words. We eat. A moment later, I hear P., a sixty-something political scientist and the director of a Belgrade library, saying: I can tell you this now – my sexual fantasy is a sailor. Primarily because he doesn’t speak. The sailor is silent, and goes away again, and doesn’t spoil the illusion of the perfect moment. I’ve always had a problem with how stupid men are, P. says, with how they ruin everything by talking.

There are five of us at the table – four women, and D. We’ve been making vain attempts to get the conversation going; pauses are getting longer and longer. Each one of us is now immersed in the sailor fantasy; we’re analysing it from all sides. Personally, I’m captivated by its precision, but otherwise, it doesn’t excite me. You must know that nothing excites me except you.

Even D.’s attentions, which would under other circumstances thoroughly reel me in, at most give the impression that he’s playing at playing; the echo of an echo.

The boat is again flying over the bay. The roar of the motor, of the loud music and of the wind that is now blowing into our faces. The waves sprinkle us. D. sits on the back bench beside me and protects me again at every jolt.

And what is your sexual fantasy? Will you tell me?

I’m not even tempted to answer him.

I sense that D. and I will become friends.

I’ll soon be old, I think. I’ll sit with the others at the prow, while D. will protect another woman on the back bench and whisper into her ear.

An old body is a tiresome husk, but if it hurts, it’s alive. And it seems that the heart does not grow old.

I wouldn’t want to stop loving you. I wouldn’t want to not know that you exist. Quite the opposite. Now, finally, I’m ready to start my tapestry.

Translated by Isabel Stainsby

[1] Translator’s note: my thanks to my friend and colleague Nick Nasev for his help with this phrase in Croatian, which I do not speak.