Love Songs & Monster Songs Excerpt

8/2/2019 Love Songs & Monster Songs Excerpt

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HE S ARK HAND OFREMOVAL:

A PROLOGUE

SARAJEVO:

1992-2002

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He was amazed how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I (these were his expressions) could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so

amiliar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes o blood and desolation which I had painted as the common efects o those destructive machines.

Jonathan Swi t. Gulliver’s ravels

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Suddenly I uttered a cry o terror. “Why this silence?” I shouted. ‘What does this silence mean?’ It was a horrible silence—a vast, chilling,deathly silence, the silence o snow.

Curzio Malaparte. Te Skin

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EMBARKA IONS

S low and harrowing a whimpering o rockets which vivisected theblack violet curtain o the sky…the strange sluggish swaths o bullets spitting down out o the black dusk o the hills like a string

o ivory pearls…the dark and exhausted amber glow rom the web o streets girding and ornamenting the slopes o apartments, the enigmaticquays, the grey bare aces o buildings opened by grenades, the straightlong tongues o minarets and towers alling around the black empty squares o graveyards embroidered in the silhouettes o their garlandedtombs…the blank darkness o edi ces rising on the city’s lost edges like a

wall scrambling to its center…scattering down rom the precipices o themountains…radiating an unsettling orange cloud o light which burnedacross the valley and again made the city seem on re. (Somewhere inthe night a little boy called out to his mother rom a dark room that heliked to watch the bright green explosions that occurred in the city onvideotape because when viewed in reverse they seemed to re stars back into the hills, silently putting to death the bad people there.) Brightly alling, they sent up sinews o pink rippled smoke. From above, a quilto orange diamonds glistened like thick pear-shaped tears as they hungrom their lampposts over the shallow owing river, polarized into dark orbs like aceless black coins— or what good was light in this place?—asthe water trickled beyond the Moorish pedestals o the city’s last bridgesand was rendered, once again, as soundless and indiscernible as the waritsel . Here, blossoming rom the darkness beneath the shattered glassskyscrapers in the black-orange capsules o the streetlights’ radiance, a

young girl with long black cataracts o hair spilling rom the crown o her head crossed over the water o the river again. Scars rom sniperri es and the shrapnel o grenades snaked long and delicate over her

HE S ARK HAND OF REMOVAL

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LOVE SONGS & MONSTER SONGS4

arms and legs, crisscrossing the white inclination o her exposed neck,inheriting the shapes o crescent moons and stars which orbited theblades o little daggers as she went. For a moment a man walkingon the ar bank watched her mourn ully, but even he had to resignhimsel to the act that, because these sad emendations to her esh hadsomehow not endured to touch her ace, they only served to make hereven more delicately beauti ul. And as she walked in black high-heelshoes that were almost too big or her over the bridge he watched heras she stopped to light a cigarette and she said nally:

—Te shrapnel o grenades and the bullets that passed throughmy body did not touch on the essence o me and so could not kill me.Now all those who escaped death, even a ew who did not, have oundtheir way sa ely into the di erent countries and hemispheres be ore thenight ell.

Summoned by men with a wool blanket appearing to cheer himon, there was also the ashen, pale aced man who, dressed in a bluestriped jogging suit, seemed to have just nished a long distance race.Tey gave him water rom a green glass bottle that used to have clubsoda in it, only letting him sip it. But then, be ore they could stophim, he grabbed it rom their hands suddenly and, swallowing all o it, he began to tremble violently. He was not a long distance runner.He lay on a gymnasium oor waiting with the others to be treated orstarvation and dehydration a ter they had been released rom deathor rape camps. He had not had any water or nearly two weeks andgulping it now be ore they could stop him he began to spit it up andconvulse. Ten he died. Just like that he ell back into the blanket they held out or him and died—

It was only then, a ter each explosion sounded, a ter each o their white blank aces came and went, that her voice lled the room inthe middle o the night through the reception phone placed on thenightstand outside the door. Blurring the boundaries o his dream’s, hervoice barely audible, she said: —You went all the way. I never thoughtyou would but you did it….and you will never come back…I don’t

want you to ever come back…Ten, sometime a ter midnight, the dull metallic whisper o the

bell above the street door downstairs ollowed as it closed around theclasp, carrying me out o sleep as it rose like a scream, pressing deeperand deeper inside to uncover me like the body o a drowned man which,



The Stark Hand of Removal 5

like the Akashic record , possesses the eternal memory o all things, thesilent and silently expressed—and only when I opened my eyes into thedark room did the dreams nally draw to a close.

INVOCA IONS

A man had asked me again what I was doing in Sarajevo, the questiondelivered in a gelatinous envelope o saliva as he drove past me underthe Alipašina Mosque one a ternoon in a tiny black taxi, landing thiscomma o spit on my eyelid with a precision astonishing enough toconvince me that I would not have survived the war or ve minuteshad I been here then. Later I ended up in his car telling him that there

was no answer, and that I expected only to grow closer to the place where the answers used to be be ore they would pass away into yetanother shape; into yet another country. A ter all I had not come hereto live, as the man who had put it in a book o his later, to go out tothe borders during the heat, trying to come o drugs or die or, one way or another, to view death, the corpses, and the res so that through themiracle o hypostasis my surroundings would begin to epitomize thedissolution o my liver and kidneys.

Even ten years later you did not come tosee about the war. It —so called because it was still a living breathing thing—haunted youeverywhere you went, through every street, past every building,destroyed or undestroyed, that you walked beneath.

Te last, a drunken Serb on his birthday, tried to ask me a kind o slew o questions with an old KGB semi-automatic handgun he had,beyond anyone’s knowing, stu ed down the ront o his pants. I waitedor the white ash rom the barrel and the answers that it would bring.But it never arrived. His riend simply walked around to the other sideo the bar when I was not thinking about anything and said:

—You see this man standing over there? You should go. He wantskill you.

But the city was not ready to let up its hold over me. Tat much was true. And like a alling light I couldn’t stretch my arms ar enoughto get out.




RELIQUARIES

Reaching to click on the light bulb which dangled rom the ceiling cordabove the bed, it wavered in its white glass shell like a skull, swingingmy shadow across the cream plaster walls, unsteadying the volume andpitch o the room as i I was swaying in the hollow o a boat on the sea.Sitting up in bed I rubbed my eyes out with my knuckles and, glancingat the clock, realized I had slept too late and missed the night bus outagain. I looked around the small room: Te narrow writing desk. Clock o the ace o God. Wooden chair. Niche o the emergency mihrab roma long ago traveler carved into the corner with a kni e. wo tall woodenbureaus with urkish scenes o love and lore. Headache. Silence. Was Idead? No. I was in the rooming house again which is no longer there:Beneath urkish wool: Startling warm: Prostrate. Supine. Clean. Alive.

Where night a ter night I looked out o my window, drinking warmbeer very late, imagining living the rest o my li e here, but slowly understanding that that would never be possible. Looking out behindthe curtains the glow o the streets attened the drapery o the night’souter void as I cupped my hands over my eyes to see through theglass. Light dripped rom the room cutting iconic shapes o shadowslike black snow akes on the allen bricks o the adjoining building

which had been crushed under the inescapable pressures o a rocketduring the war. Te entire building had crumpled like an animal or akilled man, having allen down just at the tier o the window, leavingthe room untouched except or a bullet hole still stubbornly gougedon the wall over the bed. Yet when the window was li ted the rubblerom the collapsed building trickled inside and I wondered oolishly,morosely, i blood had been le t inside o its crystals like the miracleo the shark’s teeth ound in the passes o the Himalayas. Systematicrocket and grenade barrages. Murders. Oh so many murders. Teselingering memories remained (in act they would never cease as one

war only reminds o us o another, and another) but they were not theanswers to any questions anyone might have had, least o all me. A terall it is an entirely di erent quality o blood that dries in the sand. Andlike the Pharisees said: —All good and bad things must have an ending.




SUBLIMA IONS

It was made clear to me later in the weeks that ollowed the end o the war that people began committing suicide. For almost our years they had lived in the res that were their lives. For almost our years they

were both the powder and the shells that ell on them. Ten, in a singleday, a silence with the weight o blood enshrouded the city as the allingblackness o soot and og settled or the last time into its streets. Tegrenades had stopped alling. Te guns had been carried away on pack animals, jeeps, and tanks down the backside o the mountains towardKosovo. Te charter o rockets sent down into the buildings and homeso Sarajevo had expired. No one was screaming or bleeding to death inthe streets or carrying their severed limbs around in a trance in ront o unmoved journalists. No one writhed in the porticos o shops becausea grenade massacre had eviscerated yet another wall o human warmth:o tissue, bone, and organs, a conclave o bodies brought huddled soclosely together by the simple congress o starvation and cold. Eventhe guillotine inside the city swimming pool was not slicing o headsanymore and all o the snipers had imparted their arewells leavingpostcards in their nests that said:Tere will be another time.And so thecity ell utterly silent. Te eerie allout o ash and soot le t behind romthe bellicose smoke o dying res mantled the greyness o this silence.But its voided chords still stabbed at their nervousness long a ter goingoutside had ceased killing anyone. Tus the people o Sarajevo stayedbehind the inertia o their doors and would not come out. In short: the

war was over but no one believed it. And as the weeks passed they couldnot take it any longer. Ten they put guns in their mouths. Tey hungthemselves rom the ra ters o their destroyed apartments. Tey threw themselves rom their windows. It was then that the problem withthe silence had made itsel evident. Tere had simply been too many cease res that got too many people killed when they were heeded.For i you listened long enough, wouldn’t the sneaking o explosions

whisper in your ear again? I you were patient enough wouldn’t the warsimply go on and on? On and on orever?

But then something even stranger began to happen. People nally started to come outside but, still rightened, they ran everywhere they needed to go. Tey could not help it. Tey ran through alleyways to the




now open markets or ood and water and as they waited in the longlines they listened apprehensively or the whistle o alling shells. Tey un olded newspapers to shield their heads rom bullets, which they had really once done, as they darted into the doors o their buildings.People still took the long and secretive routes everywhere they went. Allthe little nooks and crannies—the side streets and the alleys o the city that had kept them alive—unhappily unraveled in their brains. Tey knew by heart the lunch and dinner schedules o snipers and by theirchoices o target whether they were psychopathic, psychotic, pedophile,homosexual, or were women who made the coldest and most accurateo shots. (Despite all the most popular myths outside o sniper circles it

was very di cult to run rom a pulse o these bullets as the snipers hadnot been armed with single shot, bolt action ri es but Russian semi-automatic Druganov SVD’s and Yugoslavian Zastava M76’s, ring

whole magazines o 7.92 x 57mm Mauser shells, amongst others.) Tusthe reserve channels that they had always slid sa ely away into, withoutthought when they came under heavy bursts o re, were the only routes by which they moved through the city. All this time later they still everishly scrutinized over which intersections they had to duck.Tey were sickened at the distance o a street they had to crouch intoor a hundred yards, dodge an exposed alley, and then sprint in ront o the openings o a cratered building to avoid the shrapnel o which only the most in nitesimal sliver, in a ash o warm light, would take them.

All o this to meet riends, to get to the markets, to go to school againor to have co ee, the prolonged ear that had been cauterized into theirmuscles still working into them without their knowing. Suddenly they had become citizens o a transperipheral possession. Only the secret

routes created by the siege o the war existed, only the ways that hadnot gotten them killed had names, and or many weeks people werenever seen on the exposed streets o the city.

Tis was the happy birthday o the city out o war.Ten, a ew weeks later, water owed out o the taps again.

Electricity and gas emitted heat and light. But everyone was stillchopping rewood and stockpiling water. Te buses and trams circledthe city again. rees were being replanted. Te birds were returning.

But still everyone was running through the streets because, hadn’t they always been doing this? Hadn’t this always been an odd idiosyncrasy o this most amous o cities? rue, they were alive and they moved yet




somehow they were also rozen, buried in their momentous obligationslike the bodies o Pompeii under the ashes o Vesuvius whose corpses

were exhumed walking, making love, holding hands, playing chess,ghting, sleeping, drinking in taverns, urinating in alleyways. Slavegirls sold themselves in cheap pink rooms to the aristocracy o thetown. Above, Pliny died inhaling the poisonous gases while watchinghis city pass away into the oblivion o history. Likewise, in the ew months a ter the war, Sarajevo—a ter coming through the other side o its own burial—guarded itsel rom what was no longer trying to kill itscitizenry, just as one a ternoon in the nancial district I watched many o them hurrying to open their umbrellas against the pulsing blasts o asudden rainstorm. I watched them blur their pant legs and skirts abovetheir knees to wade through puddles o water which emerged rom thestreet gratings in a matter o seconds. I watched them put newspapersover their heads and duck under store awnings as they ran down thestreets trying to escape this torrential downpour which, like the bombso their war, had given them no warning. And sitting there, drinkingbeer behind the sa ety o a bar’s glass windows, I imagined what they

would have looked like i there had not been any rain. I they hadper ormed these actions out o a ear that the rain might come back at any time when it suddenly did not rain anymore. And I understoodthen, as I do now, that you cannot easily part with what has already made you the way that you will always be; —with that which will neverlet you see the world so clearly as you once believed you saw it be ore it

was set on re and destroyed be ore your very eyes.

GES A IONS

Shying away rom the nightmares that had brought me here in the rstplace I turned to leave the hotel or the last time through a revolvingdoor o car lights and white noise which scattered up through thebroken glass o the streets, whirling in the tumult o the trickling bloodin the sand, the horn blasts o the night tra c heralding the throngs

o the people under the windows o the collapsed buildings as they ambled in circles toward nothing. Walking, chattering, laughing, they moved across the crumbling mediaeval Sarači cobblestones o Baščaršija




into the smoky urnace o the old urkish bazaar. It was then I couldeel them again as i they were in my own bloodstream, and though Ino longer existed in any country I watched them as they ran up anddown in the streets, as they sat down into the chairs o ca és, as they lay their arms around each other and drank together. I watched themas they bought cigarettes, tearing open the packages and littering theminto the gutters. Crowds stood in circles talking. Tey argued. Tey

walked slowly up ights o stairs until they disappeared. Lovers kissedeach others’ cheeks under the streetlights strolling nowhere arm in armuntil morning. In the park a drunk tried to nish an old Partisan songbeneath the trees with the aid o a bottle, then ell down in the street,his riends li ting him up and dragging him to a bench to sleep it o one more night.

AND SO HE COUN RY MOVES

Standing there in the shadows o the buildings I watched all o thisor the last time: —Te combined e orts o a people (many o themmy riends) to conceal a city that was no longer there behind shroudso truth which, more precious than time, ashed in their eyes as theirstorms o laughter lled the night, as the collective screams o childrenand Muezzins sang out the consecration o their own survival, asall o it grew louder and louder through the corridors o its heart’srestoration. And so the lights o houses and apartments and cars and o the streets themselves levitated over the escarpments o the mountainscreating this city, burgeoning and bursting open like the white yellow green orange owers o the graves dotting the hills, eforescing in thedarkness unsteadily at rst, then exponentially until the stars seemed tore ect out o the long snaking valley in which the city lived. And there,convulsing in its iridescent glow like the res that once blanketed itsevery street, the silhouettes o the mountains materialized out o thepoints o these lights, eshing out their lapidary curves in the darknessas a column o darkened bodies tumbled down into the neighborhoodsbelow like a black wind, singing, carrying the ames o aCandlemas through the weeping eyes o the streets, bringing meaning and li e tothem just as our hands de ne and bring meaning to the gloves which




encase and justi y them. Ten the little girl with the wounds was thereagain— or she had never le t his side—and she said: Silence islack o existence you see. It’s silence that no one gets used to. It is silence thatis behind all that exists.But please, don’t make the mistake o thinkingthat all the shrapnel in my body is o metal and stone. Tere are many episodes in my li e that are also shrapnel.

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Love Songs & Monster Songs Excerpt