David Albahari: THE ART OF SURVIVAL The letter arrived on Thursday morning, and just a day later, on Friday

afternoon, Nemanja had sunk into such a deep depression that, at one moment, he thought of committing suicide. He did not really think of the actual deed of taking his own life, but it occurred to him that all the suffering should be ended which could clearly also mean raising his hand against himself. A different matter altogether is what would be held in his hand at that moment a knife, a bomb or a pistol all weapons Nemanja had in his apartment, although he suspected that if he were to raise his hand against himself, he would be holding a comb. No one has ever committed suicide with a comb, Nemanja smiled. He stood at the mirror, trying to part his hair perfectly symmetrically with that very comb. But a few minutes later he had to give up. Depression dislikes partings, he thought, and burst into tears. He could not understand the speed with which the answer contained in the letter had turned into a source of spiritual degradatio n, and of his bodys decreasing readiness for all activity. Nemanja knew well that depression is a two-headed beast, one that could therefore drive him towards either unbroken day-and-night sleepiness, or exhausting day-and-night wakefulness. When forced to choose between sleep and insomnia, he had always chosen sleep; this time, however, for who knows what reason, sleep would not come. He tossed and turned in bed, on the couch, in the armchair, on the floor wherever he attempted to enter the land of nod so much that fatigue soon made him start stumbling, dropping plates and compact disks, and reaching for the saltcellar instead of the bulky sugar container. At first he got angry with himself, tried to cheer himself up, and even scrunched up the letter and threw it in the kitchen bin, but depression steamrolled all of these efforts. In the end, Nemanja took the crumpled letter out, straightened and flattened it carefully, then placed it between two kitchen cloths and ironed it. This did not help either. Once it had slipped away from under him, he could not find his footing. Nemanja was convinced that he was an expert survivor: this made him even angrier. As a survivor was how he spoke of himself; at least he had before receiving the letter we have mentioned. Having lived through four slippery decades, he used to explain, you cannot be swept from your feet by just anything anymore; and then he would list everything he had muddled through. First the sixties, during which, especially in the latter part of the decade, he had swallowed, smoked and injected such an amount of opiates into himself that at one moment he actually ceased to think. His head was as empty as an empty room, without even paint on the walls. A few months later, the first word appeared to fill this void, but he was unable to decipher it. When the sixth one came, he started talking again. The words continued multiplying, and after many days, when the very final particle of narcotics had left his body, he was able to understand them, although he never repeated them to anyone else. During the seventies, he survived his military service, with consequences, though, which had followed him ever since. He turned a deaf ear to the advice of his buddies from the sixties, who recommended he get exempted from military service by documenting his ongoing rehabilitation from drug addiction, and used a different tactic upon arrival at his barracks in Doboj: he claimed that army food did not agree with him, and that he could not eat it. It soon became apparent that the army considered such cases of Nemanja no eat, as the doctor at the garrison health station defined it, to be neither an urgent health concern for the afflicted, nor dangerous to the morale of fellow soldiers, so Nemanja was left to his own fate. He tirelessly refused to eat, almost visibly shrinking away before his fellow troops. It became routine for him to lose consciousness during morning inspections; there were even those who bet on how long he would hold out before

falling. At night, in secret, he used to drink tea and eat biscuits, but this could not stop his bodily decay and mental drift. He turned into a wrinkled, slouching old man, increasingly obsessed with visions and hallucinations similar to those he had experienced during the sixties. When seven months later he was, finally, released from army duty, there was not a single part of his body which remained undamaged: liver, kidneys, heart, colon, and oesophagus all required treatment which, in some cases, was continuous. Not a single mo ment, however, had he regretted his course of action. He returned to his mothers apartment, abandoned himself to her care and culinary skills, and after three months walked out onto the street a new man. His posture was again straight, his skin toned, and his muscles ached from regular morning and evening exercise. His spirit also followed his bodys example, so, at the start of the eighties, Nemanja got a job as clerk in one of the municipal administrative services. For nine years he worked there, first in the archives, then in an office, then at a counter. Life turned into an endless flow, a routine, with no beginning and no end, where nothing ever changed, not even the faces of the people at the counter. Compared to this state, the time spent in the army seemed agreeable, while the years under opiates appeared to be an Edenic period. Nemanja felt he had reached the end of the road, and that, unless he did something about it, he would cross over to the other side. He was unsure what this other side was, although he was sure he did not want to find out. In the late eighties, his mothers illness required him to spend more time around her, so he used this opportunity to tender his resignation. As he left the municipality building, he felt his heart beating peacefully again, his sight becoming keener; he walked lightfooted, a bounce in his step, as if each moment were a preparation for take-off. If I managed to live through that he later told Dubravka, a university student he marched with several times in processions protesting against current authorities then theres nothing I cant beat. Then nothing can break me. And so it really seemed during his experiences of the nineties: clashes with the police, repeated cudgellings, cold water jets, facing off with the special units cordon, protest meetings, gun shots, scornful glances, the affectionate complicity of the likeminded, finally, the toppling of the regime and various moguls: in all this he took part as if nothing could touch or harm him, almost like an angel. Even when the policemen dragged him into a building entrance near Brankov bridge one evening, threw him on his back and tried to hit him in his crotch: while interposing his hands in a bid to shield his scrotum, his first worry was whether the blows to his back would impede the development of wings, which would one day, he firmly believed, surely start growing. He imagined them gestating, sprouting right where his shoulder-blades were, that is, slightly lower, closer to the middle, right there, he said to Dubravka, while she was putting compresses on swollen bruises, from that very spot they will sprout like shallots from rich soil. Dubravka laughed, rolled him onto his back, and, while he was groaning in pain, pressed her lips down onto his sex, and then when it started to become erect, whispered: No one can defeat a people who get this hard even after a bashing. Yes, it was not easy to endure it all, the war, the inflation, the sanctions, the closed borders, the internal revolution, the hardship, the bombings, the massacres, and all that in rapid succession, one after another, making other decades seem like childs play, like practice for the real art of survival. Not one bad psychedelic experience in the sixties, he would repeat whenever he got the chance, and then the nineties ended and no one cared about them anymore. That is how he decided to write a book. The book was to deal precisely with what he was most knowledgeable about, that is, the art of survival, and he conceived it as a loosely veiled autobiographical document. Writing did not come easily to him. He would start, stop, return to it, and start again from scratch; and then something opened up inside him, as if he had found the

right pace, the right way to commit to paper what he was used to saying, and in the course of the following six months, he succeeded in telling the entire story. Afterwards, while reading the manuscript, some passages gave him goose bumps; for example, the descriptions of abstinence crises; while others, like a detailed account of the humiliations he endured in the army, managed to bring tears to his eyes. All in all, he believed he had succeeded, he told Dubravka, whom he continued seeing occasionally, although the protest marches had long since marched their way into oblivion. She read the manuscript in a night. The following day, she said that the best bit was a description of group sex after sniffing cocaine, and that her nipples were almost prickling while she read it. Even now, she said, unbuttoning her blouse, at the very mention of it, theyre sticking out like a pair of horns. She showed him first one and then the other breast, and her nipples were, indeed, as big as pegs on a clothes-horse. Nemanja stared at her for a while, then asked her how she had liked the last chapter. Is there any more of that coke, Dubravka asked in a voice that had suddenly become husky, and when he answered negatively, she put her breasts back into her blouse, and buttoned herself up to the neck. Nemanja wondered whether he should confess that, after all those decades, one part of him had not held up, but then decided to remain silent and watch her leave without a word. He sought out other witnesses: a woman who had worked at the next counter at the municipality; Vojin, a psychologist he used to hang out with during his military service in Doboj; Mrdjan, who used to sell hashish with him to Zemun high-school kids; and asked them all to read the manuscript. Vojin was the quickest; Mrdjan could not finish the first chapter in three months. The counter woman rang him up one evening and asked how much truth there was in what he had written. When Nemanja said it was all truth, that in fact only some names and locations had been changed for instance, the book protagonist served his army duty in Banjaluka and did not work for the municipality, but as a clerk at an imaginary Belgrade company the woman replied that the greatest portion of the book sounded rather unconvincing, since truth was nothing like that. She emphasized the word truth as if she was the only one competent to say what is true and what not. As if she were a clerk dealing with truth and falsehood, Nemanja later told Vojin, rather than one dealing with the health insurance of self-employed artists and craftsmen. Vojin nodded, lit a cigarette, and then started conveying his impressions. He spoke in a flat monotonous voice, and Nemanja soon felt his eyelids closing. The idea occurred to him that Vojin might be aiming to hypnotise him and erase every memory of the manuscripts e xistence, so that he could then publish it under his own name; Nemanja gave himself the occasional pinch to the thigh to keep himself awake. Vojins judgement, if Nemanja even understood it correctly, was ambivalent; he liked the book and felt repulsed by it at the same time. Because the main character, Vojin stressed, was so different to all the people he knew, Nemanja included, there was no choice but to classify it under the genre of science-fiction. He cited a few poetic comments by Asimov, Le Guin, Dick and Lem whose works Nemanja, incidentally, had never read to prove he was right. Nemanja had stopped listening by that stage, and when at one moment Vojin paused to take a breath, Nemanja told him he had to leave urgently to visit his sick mother. I thought shed died long ago, Vojin said, as Nemanja was seeing him off. Youd be surprised, Nemanja replied, how old some people can live to be. He handed him his hat, umbrella and galoshes, and shut the door behind him. Nemanjas mother was ninety. She lived alone in a two bedroom apartment on the second floor, went down every day to buy the newspaper and some bread and yogurt, and was a keen follower of various sporting contests. She would surprise Nemanja by reciting the line-up of the entire Canadian hockey team, or quoting all the results of the last NBA round. She would also remain

silent sometimes, refusing to give reasons for this, and during such days Nemanja felt like a ghost roaming the apartment in which she sulkily stared at the TV set with the volume turned low. In Nemanjas manuscript she appeared as the mother of the narrators best friend, the person with whom the narrator shared the good and the bad. In reality, he had to admit, he would have found it hard to demonstrate his survival skills had it not been for her. During the sixties she got him out of critical situations several times, then suffered all the pains of his coming off heroin. As if through a haze heroin haze he remembered the moment when he had slapped her, the shame he had later felt, and the struggle with her, a struggle in which she had succeeded in wresting from him the knife he had wanted to use to sever his right hand, the hand that had administered the blow. While in the army, it was her parcels he used to bribe his way out of night guard duty and secure a permanent pass, and when he got a job, in the next decade, she found ways and connections not to have him fired for grave misconduct. Only in the nineties did she not lend him her support. Like the majority of old-age pensioners, she was in an imaginary relationship of sorts with Milosevic; she even kept his photograph under her pillow; and understood Nemanjas participation in protest activities as a direct attack on her. Nevertheless, she allowed him to visit her and occasionally had rather calm conversations with him about history, destiny and death. Across the screen of the TV, with the volume down fleeted images of destruction, human disgrace, hatred and humiliation, while she calmly explained why she preferred cremation and how the choice between the morning and afternoon flight to Tivat did not bear a decisive influence upon her destiny. Then the flushed leader would appear on the screen and she would jump up, approach the TV that she might see and hear him better, then return to the table, look Nemanja in the eyes and start whining. How can you do this to me?, she would say, sobbing, Am I not your own flesh and blood? Nemanja did not know what to do. He drummed his fingers on the crocheted tablecloth and set his lips to a whistle. Just as he now, ten years later, drummed his fingers while talking of the blow he had endured, and the depression that had come over him, of the incapacity to do anything, of his wish to fall asleep and never wake up, and the n, when she was about to speak, he set his lips to a whistle that was never head. Tell me one more time, she said, who did you send the manuscript to? Nemanja explained, mentioned editors names and publishing houses, careful not to say exactly to whom, where and when he had submitted the manuscript for fear he was dying of fear and shame she might go there and try to sort things out. In fact, he had no doubts she would succeed, he knew she would, but he did not wish to become a writer in that way. If I m unable to persuade them with what Ive written, he told the woman who kept the newspaper stand, than I certainly wont allow my mother to persuade them. And to his mothers apartment he would go to comfort her, even though, in general, she needed to comfort him, tell him not to commit suicide or to, at least, wait for her to die, as she kept reminding him, so that the natural order of things would not be disturbed. But when parents live long, order becomes unimportant, Nemanja thought. Of course he did not share this with his mother, not in that form, anyhow. He used as he confided to a school friend he met by chance in the street a subtle strategy and told her he did not want to be a child any more. I want to be a grown-up, Nemanja said, and at last stay out as long as I choose. Havent you been allowed to do that yet? his friend asked. Thats the irony of my life, my chum, Nemanja said. The school friend shrugged his shoulders and rushed off to catch a bus. Nemanja watched him walk away, thinking some people, like this school friend of his, would not be affected in the least had they received a letter a hundred times worse. He patted his pocket, and the letter, freshly ironed, gave a faint rustling sound, as if sent to comfort him.

In some way, it really had been written as a comfort, Nemanja had to concur. Dear Sir, the letter read, we have read the manuscript you sent us. Parts of it are good, but the manuscript as a whole is not up to our standards. The main character is unconvincing, the narration digressive, the language uneven, and the structure extremely random. In brief, we think that the manuscript requires a lot more work. We wish you success in your future endeavours, kind regards, on so forth. Not a single sentence was written with the aim of insulting the author, Nemanja said to the electricity company employee who was calculating bimonthly power consumption in advance, but every one of them is like a knife struck in the same spot. How many knives is that, the employee asked, and where is the spot? At first Nemanja wanted to point to his heart, but in the end he stopped his moving finger at his belly. I see nothing there, the employee said, and winked. Nemanja bent down and took a look. There was truly nothing there, the employee was not lying, but the pain went on and on, as if Nemanjas whole life was gathered into that one spot, threatening to remain there forever. Nemanja remembered experiencing something similar during the sixties when he woke up one morning in an unknown apartment. Everything around him was clear and sharp, as if etched with a sharp blade into the flat surface of reality. Then someone coughed in the next room, and all the engraved surfaces converged under his amazed gaze, into a single dot. He stretched out his hand, reached towards the dot and drew it to his belly. The dot bounced to his body, fell onto his skin, and vanished. After a little while, he felt it touching his skin from inside, as if knocking, quietly, because it knew that there was no one home. Thats it, said Nemanja to himself, theres no one home. He stood on the roof courtyard at the top of a Zemun high rise, and watched the Danube roll along towards Belgrade. He had come there intending to jump, but he now knew that he would have plunged into the void in vain. He had gone away a long time ago, and his body was an empty shell walking only because it did not know how to do anything else. Truth be told, before this, before coming to this roof, Nemanja had again considered the weapons at his disposal and had had to admit he would not have been able to shoot a bullet into his head, cut a blood vessel, or lie on an activated grenade. That is what reminded him of the comb, and again he smiled. Yes, he thought, life is made up of small repetitions, so small that we mostly dont recognise them, but always see them as something happening for the first time. He tried to remember the location of his comb, but could not. He remembered where he had put his brush, razor and hand cream. He remembered where his toothpaste, plasters and bandages were. He remembered the razor blades, aspirin, shampoo and wet wipes. He recalled the toilet paper. He remembered his bath salts. He remembered how he had relived his life while writing line after line, page after page, chapter after chapter. He remembered how he had started crying when he put the full stop to the final sentence, how he had thought his life no longer his, that it had become letters and words, like the way that natives used to believe that photographs imprisoned their souls. The difference was that Nemanjas soul did remain in the text; but prison is prison and slavery is slavery; and like natives used to tear up photographs to set themselves free again, Nemanja ran down the stairs to his apartment, grabbed the manuscript and tore it up, ripping out several pages at a time, and then he tore the editors letter to pieces too, the folder, and the envelope in which the manuscript was wrapped, and then he could not stop, so he kept tearing up all he could lay his hand on: books, notebooks, a telephone directory, electricity bills, a wafer box, a blank memo, paper tissues, a baby cookbook, a lottery ticket. All that was left were some old newspapers piled up under the bed, and when he bent down to reach for them, he spotted the comb nearby. He did not know how it had got there, and stared at it, until he felt a sharp chest pain. He tried to get up, but was already falling, face to

the floor, faster and faster, as outside night was falling. Translated by Alison and Vladimir Kapor * David Albahari is amongst our most distinguished prose writers. He was born in 1948 in Pe, Kosovo. He published his first book of stories Porodino vreme (Family Time) in 1973. Since then he has published more than ten books of stories, novels, and also three books of essays. His selected works in ten volumes appeared with Narodna knjiga in the nineties. For his book of short stories Opis smrti (The Description of Death) he was awarded the Andri prize. His book of stories Pelerina (The Pelerine) received the Stanislav Vinaver and Branko opi awards. The novel Mamac (The Bait) won the Nin award for best novel in 1996, as well as the Serbian National Library award, Balkanika and Bridge-Berlin awards. The novel Pijavice (Leaches) won him the City of Belgrade award (2006). He has translated a large number of books, stories, poems and essays by American, British, Australian and Canadian authors, including Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Margaret Atwood, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Thomas Pynchon, as well as dramas by Sam Shepard, Caryl Churchil and Jason Sherman. From the 1970s to the mid 1990s he was editor of several Belgrade and Novi Sad journals and publishing companies Vidici, Knjievna rec, Pismo, Kulture Istoka, Politika, Mezuza and Matica Srpskas edicija Prva knjiga. His books have been translated into sixteen languages, which places Albahari amongst our most translated writers. Since 1994 he has been living in Calgary, Canada.