Straw People

Straw People

It was December, the end of fall, 1972, and I was being transferred to the Third Infantry Regiment at N. As if in a dream I was taking leave of the stone walls that surrounded the school as if it were a dream; I had just finished at the School for Reserve Officers in Bilekje, but I felt no joy, something had withered, dried up in me. The other officers were saying good-bye, embracing each other; they were an avalanche that thaws on the spot, and I felt empty inside, I quaked in the air like an aspen, exhausted, amazed, and tied to that airy veil that wraps up good-byes. I looked at that honest, pure picture from far, so very far, but still there, at the center of that quivering aspic that was embracing and thawing. I know now that I was looking for that piece that had been torn off from me, the piece of my soul that rings somewhere among the stones of Herzegovina, wanders there, and cannot die.
The school was located in the building of the former Austro-Hungarian prison; its interior had been partially renovated, but I couldn’t help feeling that I was in jail without knowing what my crime was. The stone walls confined the air and the memories, surrounded space and time, and only occasionally allowed my thought to spread its wings over the rampart, go astray and return exhausted, divided, and imprecise. At such times I looked for the shortcut to myself, amazed by the sharp commands and the mixed messages of the trumpets.
The town, a logical attachment to the barracks, began north of the school, and the other sides of the world were mountains. East of the ramparts, the Trebinica sank into the earth; the river disappeared into a karst suddenly, its mouth surrounded by three lines of barbed wire. I avoided uttering its name during the day, but its dark warbling, unannounced and heavy, came like an omen during the night. All of us kept silent about its name, its ominousness, and its underground voice, but we dreamed about it in many different ways. One night, I dreamed about it too: the Trebishnica appeared before me as an extraordinary woman, with long, flowing hair. She beckoned me gently, with tender irony and deep woe, with suffering. And from that night on, the dream recurred, became pure matter, and I was no longer entitled to another one.
Everything was transformed in the ear, in the silence, and in it, the laughing and the bubbling of the river awaited. I never saw it sinking into the earth, but I heard its womb, its throat, its soft velvety voice; I saw how it drew me into conversation, how the darkness in its speech invited me, as if it were a woman.
It was pouring rain during my entire trip to the Third Infantry Regiment in N. The picture is a dark one when day and night, sky and earth, become one, and especially when such a day is so pregnant with meaning that it soars.
I will be brief: I was being transferred and I was not alone. I was traveling with nineteen other officers of the Forty-second Division, and I was in no way different; I was exactly like them: a disciplined soldier hard on himself, so common in the initial stages when one practices ambition. But there was one thing that made me different: on my chest, deep under the skin, a unicorn was tattooed, a memento from the Yugoslav People’s Army, and in my haversack I carried a full sheaf of blackened wheat, a book of my verse. The working title was boldly underlined and then crossed out, and under it was written the final version of the title, Straw People. On the same page there was something like a footnote on the lost river, on dreamers and visionaries, on constancy, perseverance, and imagination, but also on the bread and the salt of pure reality which the book conveys. On the reverse there was something on the woman from the dream, the stages of post-modernism, but also on the life that writers have to live, torn between what they are obliged to do and what is communicated in dreams, but I will be brief.
Constantly traveling north we changed trains at insignificant, local stopovers, blackened with old layers of soot, with names of places written long ago, and, without exception, in letters with scratched tails. Someone talked about a dog’s life, dogs and whores that usually follow armies, and the guards of the Third Infantry Regiment in N. The officer sitting next to him begged him to stop talking, and every now and then kissed a rabbit’s tail. He took the tail out of his inside pocket, pressed it to his lips, and mumbled: “Little rabbit, tiny rabbit, jump up and scare me.” The group leader sitting opposite him counted the little rabbits, namely us, with a pointing index finger, fearing he would lose us all in the rain.
At the central train station in Zagreb, we got on the train that was definitely going to N. and definitely along the only route leading there. There was a role call, and since I was last on the list, I was left in the lurch. I remained in the car corridor with my haversack next to my boots, my eyes lowered towards the floor, staring at the abstract puddle that was dripping from me. I wanted the puddle image to look like a unicorn on its hind legs, and with the tip of my boot I was helping the water to draw it. Why am I telling you this? It’s simple: it may be that the story begins at this very moment, when, feeling numb from the water and the discomfort I was plunged into, I heard a woman’s voice calling me and beckoning me to her compartment.
She was alone in the compartment: my God, it’s useless to try and explain it! I will only say that I was not surprised, it seemed as if I had known her for a thousand years, as if she had always lived in me, with her long, black, flowing hair. That which possessed me was not admiration, was not trembling, was merely a dream come true, the dream of the river; right then and there the universe was collapsing before my very eyes, and was being reborn, piece by piece, all at once. Comparing this experience with anything I had experienced until then would be useless and profane, because her beauty filled the air, the compartment, the train, all my past life, and the miracle of the magic future. It was a union of physical eternity and emotional harmony, the leap of a deer frozen in air, graciousness, a living lost river, oh, how obvious it was. I immediately felt a yearning to tear my soldier’s tunic and my shirt open, to bare my chest and fall on my knees before her. I was saying silly things, I recited my verses, treatises and sonnets, poor me. Finally, utterly desperate, I gave her my book, Straw People; I placed into her hands the entire meaning of my worthless life, and I simply told her: “A single word cannot express me, many words will misrepresent me.” I hurriedly tried to make myself clear: I was being born and I was dying in her eyes, I was learning how to walk, I was learning how to talk and I was becoming mute, I was gathering power and I was losing it, and when I was finally ready to pay the price with the testimony of my life, she anticipated my words, held me with her eyes, and said, “I know!” She looked at me again softly, feeling guilt, personal despair, and gentle anger emanating from lust and hunger, and enfolded me along with them into that noble dough in which either heroes or cowards are born on Judgment Day: I made love to a woman and to a river, to a lost river that pulled me into the darkness of its own womb. And now, I will be brief: there are events in one’s life that remain forever on the border between reality and dream, between the desired and the impossible, and they remain such, without any tendency for one side to outweigh or clarify the other. That’s how it was then, and it was long ago, so long ago, exactly twenty years, on the only train that still runs to N., and that is how it will remain. In the dream that I have awakened to for years now, the same scenes take place: we both wake up, caught in the trap of sin, with suitcases and verses from Straw People scattered all around us, and as a witness, the crest of Mount Velebit along which the storm rides and beats against the car window. The rest is just the opposite: a dark picture, a womb, and an ill omen in which all the sins of this world live.
After two hours we arrived at the railway station in N. Blending with the rain and the shoving crowd, we lost one another, without saying a single word. Something constricted my throat, someone called my name out loud, and when I turned in the direction of the voice, under its feet I saw the title page of my book, how it was carried away by the rising whirlpool and how it went further away–and nowhere.
The hours chased one another in the Third Infantry Regiment: I wore the disguise of a soldier’s zeal and dutifulness, lulled by the professional prestige that I had rediscovered in myself, thus earning the trust and respect of my superiors.
I dreamed about the Trebishnica only once, and it was a river: its throat was closed at the spot where it sank into the earth, and it flooded the area evenly. Boats drifted on it, diving ducks, mallards, and minnows swam in it, but even as I dreamed, I was confused because its fauna was that from the lake of my native town. I was awakened by the bugle sounding alarm, I jumped to my feet, and saw the smiling officer on duty standing above me, waiting for me to wake up.
“It’s over,” he said. “You’re leaving tomorrow!” The officer on duty was T.N., my commander from the First Company of the Third Infantry Regiment in N. He told me that he was on leave that night and that he wanted to invite me over to his place for dinner. “Feel free,” he said. “It will be only my wife and myself.”
All the stars of hope in the sky were extinguished that night. I will be brief. She was his wife. I will be brief: I told her who I was, where I came from, overwhelmed, naked, but also smiling: in spite of everything, she was a woman, not a river. That same night, at midnight, I returned to Macedonia on the same train.
Today I got a letter from her. I include it here in its entirety, word for word, translated into Macedonian. Here is the letter:
“My dear A.,
For twenty long years I have been gathering courage to write to you, but I kept postponing it, avoiding it, fully aware that I was doing wrong to you, myself, and the truth. But I have nowhere to turn; I have been released, but am still empty and defeated. You know that there is a war going on. The horsemen of the apocalypse ride, descend from the skies, and collect their toll. Here I give you something of a war bulletin from N. My husband was promoted to the rank of colonel and commander of the Third Infantry Regiment. In the first days of the war he was trapped and surrendered the regiment. On the same day he was either shot by a firing squad, or committed suicide, we still don’t know, but there is a cynical rumor going around town about the real reason for the fall of his regiment. But only I know the truth: he was trying to save his soldiers…
Today I was informed that two days ago, somewhere on Mount Velebit, while standing guard, our son was killed. Your son and mine. Forgive me for giving birth to and burying your son in a single day, but that is the price of sin and destiny that straw people still have to pay. Rain can never harm them, but fire, sooner or later, consumes them.
P.S. With this letter, I also send you back your extraordinary book. Only the title page is missing…
Forever yours, D.T.”
The letter was written three weeks ago, and the postmark is two days old. Somewhere between the date on the letter and the postmark, a photograph of a young man is hidden, with a tattooed unicorn on his chest.

AuthorKrste Čačanski
2018-08-21T17:23:56+00:00 January 1st, 2000|Categories: Prose, Literature, Blesok no. 12|0 Comments