Houses by Borislav Pekic

Author:Borislav Pekic
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-59017-948-2
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

At that moment it seemed as if the general had rushed out of the forest, out from behind those scattered chestnut trees, with his chest out and one leg bent at the knee, bandaged with a field dressing, while the other leg pushed down at a sharp angle against the yellowed, rough-hewn pedestal. The policeman I had glimpsed bearing down on me before I finally lost consciousness on the cobblestones of Pop-Lukina Street had been something like that guerrilla general. I had been knocked down and my pince-nez smashed, but I could still—thank God—control my movements, although I could achieve little apart from defending my face against being trodden underfoot. Feet were trampling down everything around me as if crushing grapes in a vat, rising and falling with the speed and uniformity of a pneumatic hammer, but I couldn’t swear to it that I had any feeling of pain, nor could I hear the din which had been going on during the speech and later during the fight, while I had still been on my feet. On the contrary, as soon as I was knocked down everything suddenly went quiet, though it all continued to writhe, jostle, and stagger in the artificial silence, as if the tumult of a moment earlier had reached a pitch where it could no longer be heard even though still raging. Before everything went completely blank, I managed to focus my eyes, like the shaded lens of a pair of unadjusted binoculars, on a true copy of the Vuk monument: the policeman rushing at me with his truncheon swinging.

Of that rumbled period when my senses returned—the process went on for quite a while, as I regained and lost consciousness several times—I recall only Katarina’s mistily swimming face; those jerky, ruby-red outlines which looked more like the darting tongues of a burning flame than living beings, cut certainly not like my nurses; and strangely, that green limb with the iron bandage around its joint, which, unattached to my body, plunged hissing into the furniture. My eyes finally cleared like a binocular lens at last adjusted for distance, and I managed to make out real objects from the fiery waves which, for a long while after I came to, went on flaring up from somewhere and setting fire to the corners of the room. It was our bedroom at Kosančićev Venac. Apparently I was being undressed, and someone was trying to pry something from my rigidly clenched fingers—something torn, hard, battered.

It was that very object, which seemed to have become part of my fist as if to give me some little comfort, that helped me back to consciousness: my lost hat, the Borsalino with the cleft crown, stiff turned-up brim, and black silk band. In a sorry state, it’s true, but I recognized it. (In any case it had my name inside it.) How I had managed to find it I couldn’t say, nor could the police patrol which found me, identified me, put me in a hired cab and with true deference brought me to Kosančićev Venac.

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