In/Half Read online

  For Olga, who is sitting on Katarina’s right, beside Mina, Andreja’s revelation was a final blow from which she’d never recovered. After the divorce, even after Edgar’s arrival, she’d continued to nurture romantic thoughts of Bojan’s return (her fantasy had been worked out to the last detail – he kneeling, she with extended arms, the rite of repentance and forgiveness, crosses, doves, crowns of thorns, he her mythical, pagan Črtomir, she his Valjhun), but Stoja’s coming had scraped these thoughts away and poured them out with her final period. She therefore tried to direct the scorched remains of her love onto her children, but by that time Kras had already grown up into an entirely independent being who showed no interest at all in the emotional turmoil of others, and he defended himself against his mother’s attentions with constant references to his having been sent off to boarding school, on account of which she had to double her efforts in maintaining the illusion of his freedom, that is, to leave him alone as best she could; she pitied Bernard and Alenka, which is why she could never really love them; so the only one left was Andreja, tiny, cute Andreja who, under her mother’s spiritual baton, soon turned from an innocent lamb into a pious, guilt-burdened mutton. Olga had worked hard to get her into a nunnery, since the Wolfs all blisteringly needed someone to devote their entire life to prayer (as if Bojan’s debauchery weren’t enough, Kras had lately been mentioning politics more and more frequently), and when even that didn’t pan out (Olga never learnt what made Andreja turn to sin – she suspected gypsy magic), she, distraught, tore out her hair and swore from then on to love only ghosts.

  Magda and Svetlana, Olga’s sisters, old and barren never-married twins, had for many years idled forgotten at the family farm above Idrija, surviving on porridge and polenta and tarragon potica, feeding a dozen chickens, pottering about their sole, emaciated cow, and every day jealously yanking Marshal Tito’s portrait out of each other’s hands. Even though they were perhaps ten years old when the dictator died, their late grandfather, Kras’s grandfather on his mother’s side, had, by means of long, nostalgia-rich excursions, convinced them of Tito’s value, greatness and almost semi-divine nature. Because their father’s meagre conviction ensured that they’d never fall under the influence of Western culture, and because the boys from the village were utterly unequipped for dealing with the cult of the myth, they’d remained faithful to their dead hero. When their sister, short-haired and desperately in need of simple company, visited them for the first time in twenty years, they instinctively hid the portrait in the basement. In the past few days they had ridden in a car for the first time, held plastic cutlery for the first time, and seen their first ever mobile phones. They had somehow promised Olga that next year they would make a pilgrimage, on foot, from the house of their birth to the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians in Brezje, although they would much prefer to see the sea (which they never had). They are sitting beside her, constantly whispering in one another’s ears through toothless grins.

  The aunts are getting on Bernard’s nerves. Bernard is Kras’s younger brother and he’s sitting beside Magda or beside Svetlana (he can never tell which is which). Bernard is a pitiable creature – he has spent so much time in his brother’s shadow that he has cadaverous-pale skin, extreme myopia and a withered right hand. As a child he aroused compassion; now, after having done an MBA and accumulated immense personal wealth, he arouses contempt. He much prefers it that way. All of the Wolfs, with the exception of Kras, owe him money and Bernard spends his days plotting their fates. On the evening of the death of his son Lovro, who, barely eight years old, died of leukaemia, he tearfully confided in his wife Monika that ‘everybody is just looking for a way to bind others to them so they can fuck up their lives’. He was talking about himself, but she thought he was blaming her for Lovro’s death so the next day she filled her pockets with stones and threw herself into the Sava River.

  A severe attack of chickenpox when she was five has left Alenka with a pock-marked face. She never refused empathy but neither did she particularly care for it. She and Bernard have become allies on account of their marginalized existences, but whereas Bernard reached out for a connection, Alenka coldly retreated into her own world. She has read the collected works of all Slovenian writers and poets born before the Second World War, with the sole exception of the great Ivan Cankar. She spent her twenties on missions in Africa and India (this had nothing to do with any weighty religiosity, she just wanted to help), and now she works in the national archives and writes bilious letters to Slovenian publishing houses whenever she catches a grammatical error in print. A few years ago she adopted a black boy from Uganda, named him Voranc, and told everybody he was HIV positive, since she was convinced that otherwise the Wolfs would have devoured him. Voranc is a playful little seven-year-old, and he has just left his chair and climbed onto Mummy’s lap.

  When you expose and link up all the emotional nodes of people’s lives, they will inevitably disintegrate into caricatures. But, please, don’t forget that the Wolfs are people, real, living people who breathe, feel, dream and desire, who are motivated by human rage, endowed with reason, they feel sexual desire and they remember, they constantly remember… Pick any one of them – I could go on for years about a single minute of their existence.

  But before I further assail you with this mass of people – to the left and right alike are still more uncles, aunts, male and female cousins, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, Kras’s mother-in-law (the father-in-law is dead, cancer), and a handful of family friends, neighbours and business partners rounding up the company into a semicircle – I would just like to mention the priest and the general.

  Meslier came as a young deacon to the parish of Bodičava, where the Wolfs had been living for centuries in their enormous rural mansion on the outskirts of the village of the same name, but he soon had to take over the duties of a priest when the previous one, old Šurc, had clearly gone round the bend (that priest had been found, naked and with a shaved head, on the bank of a nearby creek – he whispered hosanna, hosanna into the ear of the farmer who was first on the scene). The first sacrament that Father Meslier performed after being ordained was the wedding of Olga and Bojan. The fact that this had been a spectacular failure has lain heavily on his priestly soul for decades. He is here because Olga no longer wants to consume food that has not been blessed before her very eyes, and Kras has given in to this caprice because he wants to make sure that her mouth is kept as occupied as possible.

  Katarina had asked Kras not to invite General Globocnik, to pick some other day to see him, because she wanted this celebration to go as peacefully as possible and didn’t want to be constantly thinking of war (given that war was the guarantor of all her painful preoccupations and the stuff of many a nightmare), which wouldn’t be possible if she had the general’s bushy moustache waltzing in front of her the whole time, caught between the quotation marks of his epaulettes, but Kras didn’t grant her request. He needed, longed for, desperately required information, and he wanted to keep the general close – he hoped that the atmosphere and the wine would loosen his tongue at least a bit.

  So. Everyone’s seated. Katarina is now calm. Nobody has started bitching or yelling yet. A great success. The faces remain untroubled, the corners of the mouths are turned upwards. Katarina and Kras look at each other and smile lovingly. Here and there conversation sprouts. The increasingly loud murmuring encourages the others too. Someone even laughs. Three rent-a-waiters walk about, pouring wine into glasses. Let’s begin.

  Bernard, his withered hand resting on the table between his plate and his glass, leans forwards and turns his head to the birthday boy.

  ‘Wolf,’ he calls out in that annoying voice. Both Kras and Bojan look his way. Bernard catches the father’s gaze and raises his eyebrows before turning to Kras. Wolf is what they used to call Bojan, until he wasted that name. That’s what upsets him most. Bernard’s barb, undoubtedly planned, hurts him. Now it’s what they call Kras, everyone does. Only Katarina and
his daughters don’t.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Doesn’t it seem to you like we’re one chair short?’

  Katarina looks up in fright, but Kras knows what Bernard’s aiming at. He presses his lips into a straight line, gets up and goes to the next room to fetch a chair. He sets it down behind his. Now Katarina also understands – she blinks, shakes her head and immediately turns to Grace, who is laughing and waving in her direction. Bernard nods contentedly. Kras gives him a threatening look. A tacit agreement exists within the family – the matter is too painful to discuss in front of guests, but Bernard won’t let up.

  Olga looks at her sisters, which means they must pay attention to her, and turns to the priest.

  ‘Father, have I ever told you that thing about our Andreja?’ the guests at the table listen up, Katarina grimaces, ‘about when I found her, not even fifteen years old, maybe not even in high school, I think,’ she turns to Grace, ‘fifteen, no?’, Grace rolls her eyes, but her smile persists, ‘a sweet little thing, I remember it so well, it’s like she’s right in front of me, she had long, luxurious, black curls, and look at her now,’ Grace’s hairdo is very modern, ‘well, I come home, from work, by then we’d already sold the farm to a co-op, so I was working at the hardware shop, just before the chain went bankrupt, so I come home, it’s afternoon, not a soul to be seen, and the only thing I hear from Andreja’s room is whack, whack, like someone’s beating the dust out of a carpet,’ Alenka puts her hands over Voranc’s ears, Edgar watches Katarina and shakes his head, Kras leans over to Mila and tells her to inform the waiters that Grandma has had enough wine for today, ‘and I say to myself, “what if someone’s beating the children?”, what do I know what I was thinking, maybe someone’s in the house or who knows what, but I run up the stairs and when I open the door,’ Bojan coughs, Olga laughs, her voice rising in pitch, ‘there’s my little Andreja in her nightie, kneeling on the floor and staring at the crucifix and devotionals in the corner above the television, and she’s got an old leather belt in her hand, Bojan’s I think, God knows where she found it, a brown thing with a huge buckle, a silver one with some sort of skull on it, you know, Bojan used to listen to rock and roll,’ the guests look at each other, those who don’t know the story are already enjoying themselves, ‘and she’s flogging herself with that belt, whack, you hear, she hits herself and again, whack, you hear her hitting herself again and before I realize what’s actually going on, I run to her and grab the belt, but I scare the poor thing so much she faints.’

  Uncomfortable silence. Meslier the priest nods, ‘Yes, Olga, I have already heard this one.’ Olga continues, ‘But then, God, what to do now? If I take her to a doctor, they’d say, for sure they’d say, I did it, Christ – sorry, Father – but they could take her away from me, you know, couldn’t they?’

  ‘That would be a tragedy,’ mumbles Edgar, and though Olga hears him she doesn’t respond. ‘Yes, that would really be bothersome, I can imagine,’ says the priest. ‘Nothing. I put her in the bathtub, bathed her, and when she came around she said she had been vile and that she deserved it, my poor little one, but then I, oh God,’ looking at Alenka, ‘Alenka, get that knife out of that child’s hand!’ Voranc is playing with the cutlery but stops when his mother asks him to, ‘Well, after that I forbade her to castigate herself, I said that God already knows that she’s a good soul, that only the really bad ones should go in for self-flagellation, but I didn’t know,’ she stares at Olive, ‘I didn’t know,’ she whispers, ‘maybe it would have been better if I’d let her do it.’

  Edgar turns to Grace, ‘Horrible,’ but Grace looks serenely at Olga.

  ‘Ah, Mum, now don’t you worry about a thing. I still do it sometimes.’

  The guests smile, even old Meslier has to cough over a laugh, Olga crosses herself, looks at her sisters and gestures to them that they too should cross themselves. They obey.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Olga,’ bellows Bojan, ‘now you’ve got these two into that useless crossing, between you and I, that’s something I never thought I’d see.’

  ‘Between you and me,’ says Alenka.

  Bojan jumps to his feet: ‘Today my son turns fifty! That, too,’ nodding to Alenka, ‘is something I never thought I’d see. Not because I didn’t think he’d make it to fifty, no, he’ll make it to a hundred, two hundred, but because I was convinced I’d have snuffed it by now. But look at us, now, all here, the whole Wolf pack all together. On this occasion, I have to take the opportunity, who knows when it’ll happen again, if ever, I don’t know, I hope, or maybe I don’t, ha, ha,’ the waiter leans down to Mila, listens, nods, ‘I’ll take this opportunity to tell you that, since they’ve already taken my name, I’ve been rebaptized, born again, so to speak, the ceremony was on Sunday, but nobody came, except for my dear Grace and Edgar,’ Olga had found the invitations in their letterbox, torn them in half and tossed them in the bin, ‘the baptism was at the Savica waterfall, the falling water that reflects our lives, fleeting, trivial, sunned in the sun of nature, under the hand of Archdruid Bodhmall, a beautiful, pure, heartfelt ceremony, wasn’t it?’ he turns to Grace and Edgar, who nod. ‘Now I’m born again, under a new sun, a new name, ha, ha, please allow me to introduce myself, I’ve shed the Wolf skin, I’m no longer Bojan, my name is,’ he clears his throat, ‘Raven Cock’s-foot, I am on the threshold between life and death, and all of you are my loves, I love you, and also,’ Olga crosses herself, her sisters cross themselves with a slight delay, the priest Meslier looks at him with sad eyes, Bernard grins, Alenka sighs, Kras stares straight ahead, ‘I wanted to say, I was, ah, now…have I forgotten? Well, all the best Kra…ah, screw it, to my Wolf!’

  Glasses are raised, glasses are emptied. The waiters make the rounds. Raven is still standing.

  ‘So, that’s it then! Even the maples and the oaks and the chestnut trees are wishing you happy birthday, Kra…Wolf! The apple tree, the one out there, is turning its nose up. It says that every time someone is celebrating something the kids abuse it, all that stuff carved into its trunk, so please, if you can, I ask you to leave it alone today.’

  Good-natured laughter lets the old man keep his dignity. Even Olga chuckles dryly. Raven sits down. His beard has spilt onto his plate and Stoja discreetly shifts it into his lap.

  ‘Alenka, take the knife away from the boy!’

  Grace’s whispering lips approach Olive’s ear, translating what’s going on. Her face alternates between outrage and disbelief. When Olive glances at Bernard, he suggestively licks his lips. Edgar and Alenka are careful not to look each other in the eye (they’re still ashamed because they made out once – Bernard caught them kissing and immediately told everyone). General Globocnik is telling jokes at his end of the table; all Kras can make out is ‘…because they were all already occupied!’ Everyone bursts out laughing. Raven, who loves jokes, asks what, what, what?, and when Stoja, who didn’t find it the least bit funny, repeats the joke, he falls into that thundering laugh they all know him for, the laugh a chance passer-by could easily confuse with an unsuccessful but persistent attempt to start a two-stroke engine. Mira and Mina are behaving, Mila and Alan are visibly bored, little Po complains to her mummy that her tummy hurts and Stoja strokes her head. Kras’s mother-in-law launches into a long discourse, to the accompaniment of Meslier’s coughing, about the benefits of alternative medicine. Voranc, who has had to put down the knife a third time, turns to Aunt Grace.

  ‘Auntie.’ She doesn’t hear him. ‘Auntie Andreja.’ His mother whispers something into his ear.

  ‘Auntie Gwace!’ Grace, who has only now heard him and would never ignore him, looks at him. ‘What is it, sweetie?’

  ‘Uncle Bewdo’ – that’s what they call Bernard – ‘said you like to lick waw fish.’

  Alenka covers his mouth (and whispers into his ear – raw not waw.) Most of those who have heard are aghast. Alan and Mila look at each other and howl with laughter. Raven again turns to his wife to ask what what what?, but Stoja just shrug
s her shoulders.

  ‘He said that?’ asks Grace. Voranc, a hand over his mouth, nods. ‘Yeah, I really like them,’ she said, ‘but you know how it’s done?’ Voranc opens his eyes wide. ‘First you stick your finger in the fish’s mouth, you can do two fingers, you push it in deep, then you…’

  ‘Dinner’s coming,’ says Kras.

  Mira and Mina stare at their aunt and wrinkle their noses. Voranc shakes off his mother’s hands and says yuck.

  ‘Are we having fish?’ asks Edgar.

  ‘No, steak,’ replies Katarina, and is a little slow to join in the laughter.

  Kras gets up and motions to the waiters to bring the food. He takes a glass and looks at it. The people are expecting him to make a speech. He’d learnt one by heart, but now he’s forgotten the words. Katarina surreptitiously nudges him in the side. He looks up, scans the table, forces a smile and, catching sight of the general’s moustache, straightens his spine. His speech was written for him, as a birthday gift, by his former speechwriter at the ministry. It’s in his pocket, printed on a folded-up piece of paper. His hand slides towards it, but stops. That’s not how he wants to do it. He clears his throat.

  ‘Tolstoy,’ his voice whistles hoarsely; he clears his throat again, squints and adds some strength to it, ‘Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of one of his novels that all families are alike,’ he opens his eyes, ‘that all happy families are alike, that all happy families are alike in the same way. And that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In its own way. Our family has gone through its share of happinesses and unhappinesses, like every family, I guess, and each one of us, probably, at least as far as I know you, would say that he’d got off fairly lightly, but that he feels sorry for the rest.’ That’s not the way it had been written. People were supposed to laugh here. ‘Well, I myself have never had any reason to complain. And neither do I want to say that we’re an unhappy family, as some might think, because we are such a unique family and our happiness might look completely exceptional, which is not to say…’ He looks at his parents. ‘Let’s say, look, we certainly have the happiness, as Dad already said, of being here, all,’ the word all gets stuck in his throat, he has to drink, ‘and that both Mum and Dad are here, and my daughters, and my wife, and brothers and sisters, and all of you, dear friends, and what is happiness if not that? That…’ he bows his head and tightens his jaw, ‘ah, screw it, look, it doesn’t matter what kind of family we are. There are no happy and unhappy families, we’re just people who have created lives for one another, and if we haven’t managed to mess things up completely, and if we can still all sit together at the same table, then it must mean something, call it happiness or whatever…something like that, yes, that’s it, thank you for coming, and bon appetit.’