Homunculus Read online

  Perhaps God had made him childless so he could more easily isolate himself from everything, except from the fragile defence of thought. If it was his lot in life for loss to outweigh joy, did his appropriation of the divine dancer’s passioned imprint in the soft stone not portend his final demise? What if he were to cast it into the deepest cave or bury it in the furthest desert? Oh, how powerless commands were in this life! He had pursued the Syrian across the entire Empire, scarcely halting to rest, and now, having finally caught up with him, he took the carved stone calmly, almost grudgingly. Should he give it straight to his young henchman, whose sharp look was piercing his back like a blade? Or smile victoriously and conceal it in his bosom? It didn’t matter. The opaque eye at the centre of the stone watched him coldly – he was an ant,

  an insignificant speck in the impersonality of time. The next day, or in ten years time, he would be replaced by some other little particle: one naïve or crafty or wretched, but equally meaningless – human, all too human.

  This fairy tale is to be told to an animated-film fan

  The Round Trip of a Shadow

  Based on the story of the same name by Dimitar Solev (1930-2003)

  Scene 1:

  Krum, a man with the appearance of a sixty-year-old but is actually several years younger, walks along one of Skopje’s streets before the big earthquake of 1963. He is wearing an old railwayman’s coat and carrying a hessian sack of soil as big as a saddle on his shoulders. A tender sapling with a few delicate leaves peeps from the mouth of the sack, like from a flowerpot. Now the shadow of a child appears beside Krum and scampers around; it dashes away from him, looks at passers-by and watches the double-decker bus heading down the street. As Krum walks on and the child-shadow runs past him, soon to come back again, one or two small leaves grow on the branch of the sapling.

  Finally Krum arrives at the cemetery, along a path with deep furrows in the black earth. Mount Vodno can be clearly seen above the cemetery, overlooking the city. The shadow of the child peers curiously at the Christian and Jewish graves, stops for a moment, and then continues running around. Bird chatter. Krum arrives at a grave, some of whose letters can be recognized, but not the numbers. He takes the sapling, a flask of water and a trowel out of the sack. He digs a hole, plants the sapling and waters it from the flask. The shadow of the child helps him with the planting, although Krum is not aware of it.

  An old woman in black, squats beside one of the graves nearby. Her lament is heard. Krum does not react, but the child-shadow turns towards her and listens.

  Scene 2:

  Krum, older than in the last scene, but in the same worn-out coat plods along one of Skopje’s streets (perhaps the same one as before) soon after the earthquake. The houses are full of cracks, the badly damaged ones are being demolished, while others are simply missing and large new buildings are going up in their place. Krum is carrying the same old sack, which looks bigger than before; perhaps because of the young tree, which has grown and now has branches, leaves and a few blossoms. The child-shadow is here, the same age as before, climbing and playing in the branches of the tree, although Krum doesn’t feel its weight. But his step is different now – slower and stiffer, mechanical.

  He arrives at the cemetery, and it seems different to the last one. There are more graves, some of them fresh and in neat, regular rows. The contours of a tall factory can be seen in the background, and white dust from the new cement works falls on the cemetery. Aeroplanes roar as they take off at the nearby airport, and one flies directly overhead.

  Krum comes up to a grave in the middle of one of the rows, sighs in anguish and sits down on the slab. The name ‘Mitrush’ can clearly be seen, but the years are still hazy. The child-shadow sits down next to Krum, leans its head on his knees and watches him with interest. From up close, the wrinkles on the old man’s face are furrowed like the bark of a tree. Krum gets up with effort and starts to take the tree out of the sack. He strains and struggles, since the tree is no longer so small. The child-shadow tries to help him. In the end, with visible pain, Krum manages to tear the tree out of the sack, as if he was ripping it out of his very own self. With great effort, breathing heavily, he plants it and waters it with drops from the flask.

  A lament is heard from far away. The silhouette of an old woman in a black headscarf can be seen between the rows of graves. The child-shadow takes Krum by the hand, but he doesn’t notice and looks towards the old woman instead.

  Scene 3:

  Krum, now very old and already bent with the weight of years, trudges along one of Skopje’s streets. Its appearance has changed completely – new building after new building, advertising boards crammed into every empty spot, gaudy shop windows and noise from the dense, never-ending traffic. Krum moves with difficulty, hardly seeming to lift his legs as he walks, as if he is stuck to the pavement and has to push himself along. The child-shadow, still of the same age, is running and dashing about even more than before: it gazes into shop windows, goes in and out of stores, climbs onto the back of the sculpture of a bull and rides it.

  Slowly, very slowly, Krum draws close to what seems like a third cemetery. Now we see that his body is not only stooped, but also deformed. The noise of the cars barely subsides as he drags himself along the roads of the cemetery, which is now a veritable necro­polis with broad avenues, streets and narrow lanes; the child-shadow runs and kicks pebbles along them, and the panorama of the overcrowded, smog-choked city of the living throbs in the background.

  Now we see that Krum’s body is turning into a tree. There is no sack any more and the tree is simply growing out of his body, with its branches sticking through his worn-out coat as if through the cracks of an old pot. Krum and the child-shadow arrive at the grave.

  There is a gravestone in the form of a cross and now the letters can be seen – ‘Our dear Mitrush’, as well as the years 1951-1960.

  The child nudges Krum to step up to the grave and stand there. The final transformation begins – Krum turns into a deciduous tree with drooping branches. The child-shadow takes the flask and waters the tree. From very far away, there comes the lamenting of an old woman, but she is not to be seen.

  This fairy tale is to be told on the eve of a deceased father’s birthday

  Home for Christmas

  The seats looked much more like armchairs in the foyer of a luxury hotel than seats in an ordinary-looking, yellow minibus. There were just two in each row, no more than eight in total, plus the driver’s seat and the one next to it. A very corpulent man could lean back comfortably in one of the seats, relax and have a nice snooze during the trip. There was even space between the seats for little tables to put coffee or juice on. Altogether an almost homely atmosphere!

  The boy was already in the bus and waiting for his father to get in and sit beside him, when a woman, who acted as if she knew him, came and settled down in the next ‘armchair’ without asking if anyone else was sitting there. So his father, without complaint, sat down next to the driver in the seat narrower and less comfortable than the others.

  The woman, who had a pointy nose like a duck, immediately turned towards him and asked in a particularly loud voice: ‘Do you think we’ll get there before midnight? Your father can be as helpless as a child after a long trip, so I’ll have to run about and heat the house again before putting him to bed.’ She leaned towards him with all her make-up and her astrakhan fur coat, but he, oddly enough, caught a whiff of wool and cured meat. Moreover, this cheerful and well-groomed woman from who knows where seemed to have done herself up and to be about to go out to a carnival.

  ‘Isn’t that right, Daddy?’ she called out to his father, as the other passengers were getting in and taking their seats, some of them getting in each other’s way.

  ‘Yes, my love: You’re right.’

  He didn’t even have time to ask himself how his father fitted into this because the woman kept prattling o
n: ‘Marriage can be positive thing if it’s built on healthy foundations. And we all know who lays the foundations. The woman! Isn’t that right, Daddy?’

  Fortunately a voice called out – not his father’s, but the driver’s:

  ‘All in and ready to go?’

  ‘Yes. Let’s go!’ everyone answered with one voice.

  ‘Well, here’s wishing you a good trip,’ the woman said, offering him some vacuum packed prunes, pitted and juicy. As he was having his fourth, he thought there was perhaps something good in her excessive openness after all. The fat fellow with a fine moustache sitting behind her gladly accepted some prunes, too.

  ‘I know you from somewhere,’ she went on, ‘I think I’ve seen you on television. Oh yes, now I remember, it was the advertisement for Skopsko beer!’

  ‘Oh, that was for a little fee on the side. I’m not a real beer-lover, to be honest – I prefer a drop of good wine,’ the man said, gesticulating with his arms in quite an animated way; unusual for a man of his weight. ‘Horatio Jingle, actor!’

  ‘You have a funny name, too,’ she mumbled, as if she hadn’t heard him, and then turned round and looked at him with undisguised interest. ‘Yes, yes, that’s you. Hey Daddy, that Horatio fellow is with us on the bus. Oh, what was his surname again?’

  ‘Jingle,’ the actor repeated amicably.

  ‘So tell me, Horatio: what are the prospects for an actor these days to live off his work?’ she said and stared at him while she was waiting for his answer (an especially unpleasant habit), but the fat actor began to explain to her in his calm bass voice, with lively gesticulation:

  ‘Each of us feels at some time that he’s hit the bottom.’

  It was mostly the woman and Horatio who talked at the beginning of the trip, but later the voices of the other five passengers merged into quite a cacophony (although the woman was still the loudest). His father was the exception, sitting peacefully and quietly near the driver.

  * * *

  ‘Half an hour’s break!’ the driver shouted.

  Although he was used to unusual roadside taverns, this one was in a category of its own. There was an improvised bar, which actually looked more like a battered and peeling old lectern lifted from some university storeroom. Above it, in pride of place on the wall, hung a self-made flag made of wrapping paper and held together by a variety of sticky tapes. It bore a sun, a pyramid, and an anvil with hammer and tongs. Photographs cut out of school textbooks had been framed and nailed to the wall next to the flag: mini-portraits of Alexander the Great, Macedonian revolutionaries and the President. On the shelf above the bar lay plastic casks of wine with an imitation-­wood finish, and between them were boxes of herb teas – St John’s wort, mint, thyme and basil – or at least that’s what it said on the side.

  The name of this roadhouse was fully in keeping with its appearance; The Balkan Egyptian Club, in reference to the local Romanies who believed they had arrived in the region from India via the land of the Pharaohs.

  All the tables but two were vacant. At one of them, two men were playing draughts, while two others looked on and commented. The man sitting at the next table didn’t look as if he was interested in their game. He just sat there in his unbuttoned grey coat, with a grey-blue striped shirt and white pants with suspenders underneath, a mesh baseball cap on his head, and distractedly sipped his Turkish coffee and smoked. The little bus-load of travellers, with the pointy-nosed woman at the fore (where had his father got to?), descended on the vacant tables.

  ‘Let’s sit next to him,’ Horatio said. ‘May we?’

  ‘Of course, in fact, I’m quite looking forward to a chat with someone from home.’

  The waiter came.

  ‘A small “Alexandria” white wine for me and a Cola for the boy,’ Horatio said and then prompted the man next to him. ‘And you?’

  ‘That’s a good idea. Wine for me too, please. They say to stay away from cafés and bars, but today I feel like a bit of company.’

  ‘It looks like we’re at the right table then. Hm, let me ask you something: do you know why people touch glasses when they drink wine? To satisfy all the senses. You see its colour, you smell its aroma, and before you take a mouthful you clink glasses. Why? To hear how it sounds!’

  ‘That’s a good one!’ the fellow shouted and gave a hearty laugh.

  ‘A sick old joke – but good for starting a conversation. So where are you from?’

  ‘From far away, friend. Yesterday morning I set out from Ger­many, where I work, by noon I was in Slovenia, and now I’m here, and speaking our language again. You have to have some good cheer. To your health!’

  After the first few mouthfuls of wine, the fellow really got talking.

  ‘My boss is phenomenal. I don’t know how much he earns. A multi-­billionaire! But he understands us workers at the same time. Take me, for example: I come home every year for Christmas, alth­ough they don’t celebrate it at the same time as us with our Ortho­dox calendar.’

  ‘Yes, when our Jesus is being born, theirs is already crying and laughing and being breastfed. Advanced as he is in the West, perhaps he’s already taking his first steps!’

  The fellow smiled blankly at Horatio’s wisecrack and went on with his own story.

  ‘But my boss agreed. He said: “You’ve been a good worker all these years. You work overtime without grumbling, so of course you can go home for Christmas. If you work well, I won’t say no.” And he’s a man of his word. He sets you a quota, and if you exceed it there’s a bonus. That’s all that counts for him – success. Business means profit. That’s how my boss is.’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, but that jars on me. Anyone in the arts and culture in this country has to eke out a living, and here you are talking about filthy lucre.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Forgive me if the comparison sounds far-fetched, but with pigeons the chief bird spends the whole time chasing the others so they don’t peck a crumb, although he goes hungry himself. With people it’s the other way round: the boss forces you to work all the time, and he creams off the money.’

  ‘My boss pays me well. I’m sure I earn five or ten times as much as you.’

  ‘That wouldn’t surprise me... I guess that’s how things are today,’ Horatio said to him, but perhaps more to the boy. ‘Personal gain has become the main goal of our lives. We all wear masks of compassion, understanding and humility to help us rake in more dough. And inside – poor suckers that we are – we tell ourselves we’re something special. Success? What is success after all? Do you consider yourself successful?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘I wish I could say that for myself. I used to have my sights set on success. But that’s a very fluid category in my profession. One day you’re at the top, people recognize you in the street, your photo is everywhere and, what’s more important, you’re full of self-­­

  confidence. But before two or three years have passed, nothing works any more and your former self-importance goes down the plughole. Film-directors shun you or give you demeaning little supporting parts. And you start to whinge and whine: oh, what rotten luck, that’s my chances gone, I’ve got no choice but to make a living from hack roles in this accursed country in this brain-dead age. And although you’re as fit as a fiddle you just can’t make it, you’ve got no money for this, you need money for that, you get frustrated and start shouting: “You’re all communist blockheads!”, although you don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. That’s a Macedonian actor for you today, and that’s why you see me in the beer ads.’

  This outburst is like he’s rehearsing for his role in an evening performance, the boy fancied. It’s as if he’s talking to people who aren’t here. And, sure enough, the initial élan of the conversation evapo­rated and the fellow slumped back in his chair. Almost in silence, they all finished off their drinks. The simple fellow was the f
astest.

  ‘Please let me pay,’ Horatio said.

  ‘Out of the question – it’s my shout. I’m paying for you and the kid as a thank-you for your company. And now I have to keep driving. They’re waiting for me in my home village.’

  He shook hands with them as if he was in a hurry, and his cordiality seemed forced. Only when he got up from the table did they notice that he was unhealthily pale in the face, with dark circles around his eyes.

  ‘I feel bad, you know,’ Horatio said a little later.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For unsettling the fellow like that, you know, I think you can say there are several very different groups of people who feel the need to leave this country. The biggest is the diaspora – the economic emigrants. Macedonia has capitulated in the two most significant fields, you know: education and the brain drain, which boils down to the same thing. Either way it’s a net loss. People are obliged to leave their home country in search of a better life. Ubi bene, ibi patriа! What people discuss here every day in the parliaments, newspapers, cafés and even bedrooms is a farce. They call it politics, but it solves no problems and the young people are running away from us, never to come back!’ Horatio sighed and drained his wineglass, but his unquenchable thirst for conversation did not allow him to take a break.

  ‘What if...,’ the boy ventured to say, but Horatio continued:

  ‘There’s also another, much smaller group of Macedonian migrants, who don’t stop roaming the world in this age of low wages; and where they need a visa for every damn country. You’d be surprised how many young and mainly poor people from our little country have made it all the way to India, Cuba and China. I don’t understand either how they manage to find the means, but somehow they do. Yes, my boy, if you ask me, those are the true wayfarers. The diggers.’