Battle Songs by Daša Drndic

Author:Daša Drndic
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811234795
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:01+00:00

III

From the balcony I see a small residential building. A young woman lives there who comes out onto her terrace from time to time and shouts: I am God! God, can you hear me? I am God! Sometimes she smears her face with a brown color and ties a leather band over her forehead so she looks like an Indian, and then shouts again: I am God! There are days when she is very angry. Then she throws things onto the street: books, rubbish, clothes. There are days when she keeps changing her clothes: from evening dresses with gloves up to her elbows she slips into short trousers and summer sleeveless T-shirts, then she puts on a winter coat and sandals with nothing on underneath, then an elegant suit and high heels, but no stockings. There are days when she goes to the nearby crossroads, circles around the very straight corners of that crossroads, marking out with her footsteps huge imaginary rectangles. She often has a long cigarette holder in her mouth, with a lit cigarette in it, and waves her arms, with her head thrown back, with every step she bends her knees and hops, as though doing gymnastics or as though she were preparing to fly.

Her windows are always lit. She has decorated the terrace balustrade with various different colored mushrooms, little caps with zigzag edges, blue, yellow, green and pink. And those mushrooms glow. She has floral curtains. Everything about her place is brightly colored and cheerful.

I watch that woman every day. I look into her windows even when she’s not on the terrace, when she’s not at the crossroads. As time goes by, I am ever less certain whether that woman is just an unknown neighbor from the other side of the street, or whether that woman is perhaps actually me. I know that my meeting with Konrad Koše and the confrontation with his past, with the past of his parents, was a quite ordinary occurrence, a quite possible phenomenon for many of my generation all over the world. What kind of small dramas and family historical pages open up in Germany, for instance? Or in Japan? Or South America and North America? The president of Croatia would like to mix the bones of the victims of fascism with those of their executioners. The president of Croatia would like to reconcile, if not actually the victims and their executioners, then at least their offspring. How naive! How senseless! The bones are already well mixed, all over the world. Not thinking, not knowing, not searching, not wishing to search, the offspring of both, the victims and the executioners, fall in love, make new children, and the grandfathers of those children (victims and executioners, those who are still alive), dangle their grandchildren on their knees with a sense of profound historical and personal defeat.

But for me that was too much. Becoming increasingly like the woman from the other side of the street I was becoming increasingly bad for Konrad.

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