Crumbs (2 page)

The woman talked and talked. Instead of words, balloons were coming from her mouth.

She said, ‘Blablabla.'

Hippy said, ‘Transcendence.'

Poet said, ‘Poetry.'

A new round.

Her again. ‘Blablabla.'

And so on. Endlessly. All together, ‘Blablablatranscendenceblablablapoetryblablablanirvanablablablablablabla…'

They were dancing in circles. Hippy and Poet, high on the free booze, would have agreed with the devil himself. She, quite a bit younger than the rest of us, was drunk on the status she'd managed to buy for herself. She wasn't used to having money. Some cash had come her way from somewhere. Maybe she'd stolen it. It didn't matter. There'd be none left by tomorrow.

She was enjoying her new role. We were nodding dogs.

Suddenly I felt disgusted with it all. I was drunk after one glass. A result of my three-day fast.

There's no difference between selling yourself for a drink and selling yourself on the street. Both are simple whoring. I tried to collect myself and follow the conversation.

‘I've never seen such a shitty film.'

‘It just wasn't contemplative.'

‘Or poetic,' added the other echo.

Her again. ‘A crap film.'

The echoes didn't add anything meaningful to her conclusions.

‘He hasn't got a clue, that Polanski.' She started another round.

They were talking about the film
Tess
.

I pushed my chin forward. Made room in my mouth for my voice to sound deeper. I like bass.

‘You have no idea, do you?' I blurted out so aggressively that she turned towards me. Up until then, she had barely noticed me. I'd been on the outer edge of her charity circle.

Hippy and Poet looked at me with horror. They thought I must have gone mad. Throwing away free booze. They looked at me as if I'd just appeared from Mars. She lifted her head and struck back.

‘You know, I can do my own thinking. I don't have to agree with you.'

A game of poker was just beginning. Time to bluff.

I leaned forward, almost into her face. She stared back at me stubbornly.

‘Don't you think,' I said, ‘that the scene where the heroine, on becoming the owner of the plantation, gathers together all the black slaves and gives them their freedom, is a hymn to humanity?'

She couldn't compete.

‘Well… of course…'

Her voice lost its confidence. Silence would have meant surrender. She had to say something.

‘I liked that too, that scene. Before, I was talking about the overall impression the film had on me.'

I fell back in my chair. I almost hugged myself with satisfaction. He who bluffs, wins. All that remained was a routine which had to be carried out as speedily and forcefully as possible.

‘Which film were you talking about, my dear?'

‘Tess.'

‘You're not going to believe this.' I looked her in the eyes with feigned confusion and surprise. ‘There were no black slaves in that film and no bullshit about freeing them.'

Embarrassment. Pure, naked embarrassment.

I left her to fall apart for a few seconds in silence. Then in a by-the-way sort of way, ‘So you're criticising something you haven't even seen?'

‘I have.'

‘You haven't.'

‘I have.'

‘Haven't.'

Faster and faster. Blow after blow. Every word a direct hit. Right next to her face. Her breath smelled sour.

Finally she gave in.

‘I read a review in the paper.'

‘How can you talk about thinking for yourself, then?'

She floundered.

‘I read this critic's reviews regularly and I know we always agree.'

I leaned back in my chair. Talking calmly and contentedly.

‘So you should have said earlier, “We can think for
ourselves.”'

Finally she got it. Who was I to interrogate and humiliate at her expense? She got up, saying she had to catch a bus.

Hippy and Poet looked at me with unconcealed hatred. They immediately offered to see her to the bus stop. She gracefully accepted their offer.

I didn't force myself on them.

They left.

I felt exhausted and content, as if I had just graduated in cross-examination at MI5, the CIA, and KGB and become a correspondent member of a few other similar organisations around the world. I took a last sip from the bottle and let it slip down my throat.

Any further ones I had kissed goodbye.

‘Oh well,' I sighed weakly when I felt the waitress approaching from behind me, probably to collect the empty bottle. I didn't lift my gaze from its green glass. A hand with garishly painted nails grabbed the bottle and took it away.

And put a new one in its place.

I looked up so quickly that my jaw couldn't keep up and stayed open. A frame for a dumb look. The waitress, as if she couldn't believe it either, gestured to the table behind my back.

The guy with the UCLA logo nodded to me.

Undoubtedly an invitation. Feeling unsociable, I preferred to stay where I was and turned towards the door. Hippy and Poet were now drinking and nodding in another bar. I was separated from them only by one of my occasional attacks of aggression or, as I called it, character. It probably wouldn't last much longer. Certainly not as long as Hippy's thirty years, or Poet's forty. At twenty-two there's nothing to decide anymore. You've got to decide
during puberty. Between death and growing old. After that, everything else is self-delusion.

With an occasional kick from the spirit which can't quite reconcile itself to reality.

Hippy was a remnant of 1968, like many others in our villages and remote hills. He rolled joints, talked about transcendence, occasionally cut an inch off his shoulder-length hair, sticky with grease. If he became too engrossed during smoking, he would sometimes burn his beard and look a couple of years younger. He bummed for bread and drink, which Poet, on the other hand, didn't need to do at all. He worked at the foundry every morning, had his lunch there, too. In the afternoon he only drank on somebody else's account. He never used a penny of his salary. Everything went to his self-publishing ventures. He published a volume of his poetry every two months. A day or two after publication, in a navy-blue suit with a carefully brushed artist's beard, he'd be selling samples in the bar. His total number of customers in a year was smaller than the number of his fingers. After two days of persistence he would disappointedly admit defeat. Once again, he would put on his scruffy brown jacket and his brown trousers with the small flowery pattern, get drunk, and hand out the leftover copies of his work of art to anybody who cared to reach for them. There must have been seventy of his books in my flat. I'd read two of them and sworn never to open another. I kept my word, but that is not a proof of my strong character. Resisting such a small temptation is no great virtue.

He'd had it best a few years ago when he'd gotten a job as a primary school magazine editor. He resigned from the foundry immediately and dedicated himself right away to collecting articles from the hopeful young literati. The
school had its own committee of children who sorted, cut, and bound the sheets. A printing house offered to print the front and back cover for nothing to help the aspiring artists.

That year, twenty-two new volumes of poetry were published by our Poet and one reduced issue of the school magazine due, according to Poet's editorial, to technical problems and lack of material. After he was kicked out, he went back to his job at the foundry.

This bottle, too, was empty. It was time to talk to the UCLA guy. I moved seats. He immediately waved to the waitress and held up two fingers.

That, of course, meant two more beers. I started to like him. His appearance was different from the other immigrant workers at the foundry. He was wearing tennis shoes, not the winkle-pickers with raised heels everyone else was wearing. His jeans were the right length and not turned up on the inside. His hair was closely cropped and he had a few days growth of stubble. He even had the kind of nose and lips you'd expect. There was something in his eyes which confused me for a moment. As if I had already seen them somewhere before. Not the eyes themselves, probably just the look. I couldn't remember where and when.

He said, ‘I'm Selim.'

He hesitated a moment before offering me his hand.

‘Egon.'

He nodded as if he already knew my name.

‘I liked the film, too.'

I was surprised at his pronunciation. He couldn't have been in this town long. I'd been seeing him in the bar for only about two years. He spoke almost without an accent.

‘Yeah, yeah.' I nodded and decided not to tell him that
I hadn't seen the film at all. I'd only read Hardy's novel.

The waitress brought the two beers.

I stared at the table, which was scratched and carved by knives. We avoided familiarities, such as toasts and knocking glass against glass. He didn't try anything like that.

I took a gulp. Selim was talking about the film. I couldn't follow. Drunkenness hit me on the back of the skull with its full power. Images split into four and scattered. I was trying to catch hold of the space, to patch it together. Gave up in the end. I was looking at the face in front of me, which was distorted and mangled as in a fairground hall of mirrors.

‘The film was beautiful.'

He breathed the word ‘beautiful' so gently.

The waitress started turning chairs upside down and putting them on the tables.

‘TIME TO GOOOOOOO!' I heard just behind my ear.

And we went. The last two. We stopped in the street. He looked at me questioningly, as if to say, ‘Let's go to another bar.' I stumbled. In the foundry, which was filling all of my field of vision, they opened a furnace and the night became red.

I was interested to see whether a goodbye or vomit would come out if I opened my mouth.

I managed to speak.

‘See you around. Cheers!'

‘Cheers.'

I ran into the narrow passage behind the bar. Leaned my head against the wall and left my signature on it. Took a few steps away from the sour liquid. Sat down and had a nap. I was woken by repeated stomach spasms, which
pushed the rest of the drink out into the open and choked me for a while longer. It passed. Leaning on the wall, I took pleasure in the view, which became crystal clear. I was observing a thin trickle of saliva dangling from my lip, lit by the flames leaping from the top of the chimney.

I took a few trial steps and, happy with the result, went off to Karla's.

The road by the foundry was completely empty. The well-behaved workers went to bed with the cows. The less well-behaved took to singing maudlin love songs in the bar. The howling voices of the singers accompanied me as I walked.

Karla lived on the third floor. I listened tactfully with my ear to the door. All I could hear was the radio. A woman's voice was reading the news from around the world, wherever that may be.

No fuck-inducing record on the stereo. Okay. I rang the bell. Karla opened the door wrapped in a man's orange bathrobe. She'd just had a bath. Fresh. Sweet smelling.

I peeked inside the flat, just in case. She shook her head and asked, ‘Hungry?'

‘Yeah.'

I received her most beautiful smile, which always drove me wild. An uncovered row of upper teeth. One tooth always slightly biting the bottom lip.

‘Come in, I've got some soup left over from lunch.'

I took off my shoes. My toes peeped out of my socks to greet Karla. I put on the slippers that she offered me and followed her to the kitchen.

She turned off the radio. Somewhere in the building a man and a woman were arguing. A child was screaming. The usual urban silence. Karla had her washed hair wrapped in a white towel, turban-like. She lit the gas with
a match and put on the pan. She leaned on the kitchen counter and watched me sit at the table. Above me a light, not too strong, with a paper shade.

‘Another study attack?'

I shrugged my shoulders. I admitted. What else could I do.

‘Whose turn was it this time?'

‘Thomas Aquinas.'

She laughed.

‘And how long did it last?'

‘Three days and two nights.'

‘Then you really do need a bowl of hot soup.'

I wasn't in the habit of coming to Karla for food. Only after my occasional attacks of studiousness as she called them, I showed up at her place to eat. Ate the leftovers from lunch, or an egg.

‘You won't believe me, but I can just picture you. Bent over a book for three days and two nights. Your only movement the turning of a page. When is it enough for you? When you faint?'

‘Yeah, that's about right.'

She poured the contents of the pan into a china bowl. Usually we would drink tea out of it. She set the table for me, gave me a spoon, and sat down opposite me.

The light shone on the little creases which had developed at the corners of her mouth and eyes.

‘Egon, you're not getting religious, are you? Weren't you studying
De Civitate Dei
last time?'

Her voice had a throaty, velvety quality. I always thought of it when somebody mentioned Berlin in the thirties. A whore's voice.

‘No, that was the one before.'

‘And the last one?'

‘The phone book.'

Laughter.

‘That's exactly what I like about you most. Your unpredictability is so predictable. Like the time when you had that punk group, what were you, The Young Komsomols, or something like that?'

She shut up. We had a quiet, gentlemanly agreement that we did not talk about each other's pasts, in any shape or form. Sometimes one of us slipped. She more often than me. She was getting old. I had seven years' advantage.

She immediately changed subjects.

‘Do you want some more?'

She pointed to the empty bowl.