Dinner Service for Guests

/, Literature, Blesok no. 69/Dinner Service for Guests

Dinner Service for Guests

I have lived with my sister since the death of her husband (God rest his soul!). He was a good man, though how he put up with Bella all those years is beyond me. She’ll be the death of me, too, sooner or later.
My sister calls herself a ‘multi-media composer and musician’. When I gossip about her with my friends I call her a dabbler, because in fact she can’t play anything except the piano—and she does that badly. She refuses to play classical music because someone once said, many years ago, that under her fingers Chopin sounded like a hammer banging upon an anvil. It may have been me who said so, but that is of no importance. What is important is that, after receiving this comment, and most probably after receiving many similar remarks in the course of her studies, Bella started playing some strain of modern jazz which my ears have not learnt to abide to this day.
For a long time she performed her jazz before audiences dominated by young men with hard-pressed lips and thick-rimmed glasses and women of a certain age whose self-styled hairdos, though impeccable at the front, were unkempt at the back. Then all of sudden she became a composer and started writing ‘contemporary’ scores. My ears were even more troubled by this music, if one can call it such. Her pieces typically started with the repetitive hitting of a key in the lower register of the piano, continuing until the sound faded away completely. The piece would then proceed with the staccato banging of a key in the higher register, followed by a tremendous noise in the middle register—repeated in such a manner until the piece came abruptly to an end. All this ‘dialogue’, as the critics dubbed it, reminded me rather more of the ‘dialogues’ she and her late husband Simon had enjoyed at home than anything resembling what could be called a work of art.
My sister’s experiments in music further evolved in the field of orchestration. Having always been au fait with contemporary trends, Bella soon realized that, where the Balkans were concerned, the greatest demand was for art related in some way or another to war. This theme had the benefit of enabling foreigners to identify the only thing they knew about the area with the additional advantage that they could pride themselves upon their compassion in being so moved by the great pain experienced by the indigenous folk. Thus my sister’s first composition was entitled Bloody Greeting and started with a gunshot.
The live performance of this work kicked off with the explosion of a cap from a toy gun, spreading a terrible smell amongst the first few rows of the audience and triggering a coughing fit in one elderly lady. The conductor was entrusted with the theatrical aspects of the gunfire, but as the string section was supposed to start screeching dissonantly immediately after the shot had been fired, there would either be no time for him to dispose of the gun or he would become so confused that he would continue waving the gun in his right hand throughout the entire first movement. Some people in the audience were fascinated by this new concept and it received many raving reviews in the media. Her next work was called Screams and was a ‘postmodernist mix’ of contemporary and historical conflicts. By this my sister meant to imply that she was inspired by the poetry of Grigor Prličev, on the one hand, and on the other by the screams of war she could hear all around herself in the Balkans. Accordingly, this work—one of her direst efforts and certainly the most unbearable for the ears—consisted mostly of screams. These screams were not the ordinary screams of people who genuinely suffered throughout the Balkans, of course, but screams produced by renowned sopranos, altos, tenors and baritones. This work was at the same time her first flirtation with multi-media: on a screen behind the orchestra which accompanied the screaming group, she projected black-and-white footage of two small runny-nosed children crying. I felt terribly sorry for the children, though I never asked her how she obtained the footage nor how she managed to make them cry so convincingly, although I guess the latter would not have been too much of a problem for her.
My sister belongs to a generation of, let us say, artists who are neither part of the established older generation, nor enjoy the benefits of the younger generation obtained merely on account of their youth. But Bella is perfectly aware that she will never be admitted into the older generation, simply because all thrones have already been taken up, and that by joining the younger generation she might travel the world and win popularity with her multi-media music projects, which have obviously retained their topicality. I believe this was the crucial motive for her to start producing Screams and suchlike.
Despite her tyrannical behaviour at home, Bella has charm and used to be very pretty. People who do not like her have started calling her ‘The Belly’ now, but I haven’t told her this yet as I am saving it for a special occasion when I am more than usually annoyed with her. She used to have a firm behind and pert breasts, a narrow waist and slender, shapely legs. Lately, however, her waist has somehow merged with her behind and her breasts, and her legs have also started making attempts to fit in with the rest of her body. In other words, Bella has gotten fat and broad while her face and neck have remained thin. Given her predilection for wearing bell-like dresses, she now resembles a triangle in form. The skin on her face has sagged a little, but remains beautiful in complexion. Her problem is that she refuses to accept the fact that she is getting older and uglier and endeavours to stay young by increasing the amount of make-up on her face. She won’t leave the house without first having painted dark-silver crescent moons on her eyelids and smeared lipstick around her mouth in an attempt to give her lips a fuller look. When her eyebrows began thinning, she compensated by drawing them in with black eyeliner; but the results are not always symmetrical and lend a cynical expression to her face at times and a look of confusion on others. I admit she doesn’t look too bad from afar, with her eyes and mouth brought out, but I have had to advise her at least once, from the bottom of my heart, to maintain a certain distance when speaking to people because in close proximity she looks like a witch.
I am bemused by her slowly turning into a hag since she is very particular in all other respects. But this is only one of her characteristics which exasperates me. For instance, even though it was her suggestion that I move in with her (apparently, she was in a state of shock after her husband’s unexpected departure), she at once strictly specified the particular areas of the living-room which I was allowed to occupy with my belongings. One such space was the desk in the living-room, which, of course, we both had the right to use. But she flies off the handle whenever I fail to move my things off the desk, and once she even rushed into my tiny bedroom and threw the scissors I had left on the desk at me as I lay asleep. She did this, I know, because she abhors my habit of cutting out interesting snippets from the newspapers and pasting them into scrapbooks. Given that I have pursued this hobby since the age of thirty, I have accumulated thirty-two years of interesting cuttings and a large number of closely organized scrapbooks which I occasionally pull out to leaf through. When I moved in with Bella, I was allocated only two of her many bookshelves—all replete with pretentious books and perverse ceramic statuettes. Mine are the bottom two shelves, forcing me to stoop low to fetch my notebooks, though she knows I have back problems. In the first months after I moved in, despite her still being deep in mourning for Simon, we had terrible rows whenever I failed to tidy away any unused cuttings from the desk or the floor. And while I have made concessions to her fastidious cleanliness, she simply cannot accommodate herself to any signs of my presence, even if they are only at her desk. Any felt-tips or pens I might leave behind, for example, she will remove at once and place in a drawer, again at the bottom of the desk, while her pens stay neatly arranged in a china mug next to the computer.
She employs an excellent defence mechanism to shut me up whenever I happen to complain about my rights. She starts weeping for Simon, saying that I only create additional stress instead of helping her. I don’t know how long this false mourning period is going to last, but I cannot bear it for much longer. I feel as if she runs my life and, in spite of her being much younger than me, as if I were a child and she my mother. Still, her fastidiousness and her hysterical outbursts whenever I do not conform to her standards force me do even the most hateful things—like clearing the table immediately after meals, stacking the dishes in the dishwasher and wiping crumbs off the table instead of lying down, like all normal people, and taking a nap.
When I moved in, Bella did do one clever thing in allotting me a separate toilet. Occasionally, it is true, she meddles with my bathroom, and even concerns herself with the tidiness of my tiny room, but only when she is expecting some of her important guests.
With these important guests she can really be very pleasant. Her charm and smiles succeed in seducing the special sponsors who make it possible for her to hold her ‘concert exhibitions’ or ‘musical performances’. For this reason, our home is regularly visited by renowned guests from the world of culture and politics, rewarded with special treatment if they are foreigners. I hate these situations and try to avoid them as much as I can, but I am often a witness to performances staged by Bella for my eyes only before the arrival of her aristocratic guests as she is then invariably in a state of utter panic. If I were not there to help her prepare the copious amounts of food and cook the spinach pie, I believe she might faint. Before the guests arrive, she pays special attention to the flat being impeccably clean and tidy. It is only then that she makes me clean my toilet and tidy up my room, just in case any of the guests wander off into my ‘filthy’ part of the flat. Several hours ahead, she checks whether all the shelves have been dusted, covers the tables with the linen for special occasions and slips the cushions on the sofa in their special covers which she brought from Pakistan.

2018-08-21T17:22:56+00:00 December 21st, 2009|Categories: Prose, Literature, Blesok no. 69|0 Comments