In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • For Two Days, and: The Children in Our Village
  • Aleš Šteger (bio) and Urška Charney (bio)
    Translated by Slovenian Brian Henry (bio)

For Two Days

For two days I’ve been cleaning the house the tenants were evicted from. In a back room, under the radiator, I find a one-cent coin and two paperclips stuck together, a couple embracing endlessly. I wring the cloth for cleaning the floor, black water and sand flow down the bathtub drain. All I do is move dust.

I’m watching Lost Highway when the phone rings. The voice says Svetlana died on her way home the other night. The voice knew her for thirty-five years. There’s much guilt for what was said to her during their last conversation, that she over-ate too much and was an insufferable nag.

When someone dies, this is our first thought: where did I last see this person, what did we talk about? A place which gets its own “last time.”

At the end we expect the words of a prophet, a theatrical farewell and a grand closing act. But someone falls asleep just as they fell asleep night after night for six, seven decades. Someone else is driving down a highway, his heart fails, the car hits the guardrail. It’s not clear if the impact entered the consciousness of the dead.

What did I tell him the last time we met? Did I overlook something, an ambiguous clue, a message for the survivors? Shouldn’t I always, in every conversation, utter words with a consciousness of finality? What would that change? Wouldn’t the incessant threat of the last word be exactly what introduces theatricality into a conversation, make communication impossible? Doesn’t speaking mean speaking unfinished matters? And shouldn’t I first ask what the end really is, if it’s all just moving dust? [End Page 162]

The Children in Our Village

The children in our village feared a man who never spoke. Hunched, he would just grin silently now and then. Many times, someone furtively threw a stone at him, and we crossed to the other side of the road as he slowly hobbled toward us. He died as he lived, quietly and lonesomely, and to this day he remains the village’s only resident whose name I never learned.

The two-headed wolf in The Kunstkamera of Peter the Great, Ritta and Christina Parodi in the Parisian Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, pairs of fetuses in formaldehyde in the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité. Teratology could not explain if these creatures grew together or if they were one that never split all the way. What does the Creator’s plan have in store for them? The unborn who for centuries haven’t been able to die. It’s not death, but birth, that’s mysterious.

Years ago I went to the maze of mirrors in the Viennese Prater. A reflection of me as a blimp in one mirror stretched to touch the ceiling in another, and in a third, and in the reflection as well, my head blew up, making us laugh. Searching for the exit, I leaned against one of the mirrors. Our bodies grew together. Perhaps they were never separated before and the mirrors were there only to conceal the dimension of time.

The road leads past the English row house we once lived in. In a year and a half, I didn’t see anyone enter or exit the house next door. But sometimes, on clear mornings, or after a rain, a man’s cry broke from behind a thin wall, so desperate it chilled me to the bone.

Nails are the biggest mystery. I trim them over and over, but they stubbornly escape from my skin. As if they feared the body. They suggest that I also fear it, suspicious of all those who hide [End Page 163] mute organs. Later I read that in Denmark in 1995, during the autopsy of a boy’s brain, the remains of twenty-one fetuses were found. His unborn brothers and sisters.

The mystery is birth. [End Page 164]

Aleš Šteger

Aleš Šteger...

pdf

Share