Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2004 - Ljudmila

Daša Drndić
Leica format
Extract from the novel
They say, some Japanese over there grows bonsai-kittens, dwarfish ones.
He puts them in a bottle, connects a probe to their anus with the other
end sticking out through the neck of the bottle, then through that probe
he feed them. The food isn’t natural food but chemical food that sterilises
the kittens while it feeds them. Eventually, the kittens acquire the shape
of the bottle. In the bottle they can’t move, they can’t walk, they can’t
groom themselves, and as the bottle is often angular, one day the kittens
become angular too.
They could place people in bottles as well; those people would remain
small, they’d become dwarfs, who with bulging eyes gaze through the
glass and perhaps only move their lips. Those dwarfs and dwarfettes, those
human monsters, could be placed on shelves as decorative people. On
those shelves there would be rows of jars with heaps of humanoid creatures
breathing, panting, so the jars would be misty. There would be silence.
Living silence, rhythmical and wavy, human. Human silence.
In a mental hospital in the south, maybe even in the north, the patients
have sewed up their lips – with catgut made of silk. Catgut is strong thread.
While sewing, the patients used a wide slanted stitch so each mouth got
sewed up in only three or four goes. That was a (silent) rebellion of the
patients against the staff who paid no attention to them. In the asylum,
then, even bigger soundlessness came to be, a huge hush which today
like steam, like smoke, flows from the ceilings and the walls of that dilapidated
building in the middle of nowhere and in clouds it rises towards
the sky; during moonless nights, the same soundlessness, that sinister
human hush, supposedly insane, returns as a breeze; as a feathery rain it
falls upon the blurred windows of our exile in nowhere land and, in order
to survive, because that is their only air, the patients use that contagious
but odourless breeze, that invisible cobweb of silence, to fill their
now already hollow, porous lungs. The landscape around the asylum is
sealed, fossilized, as a drawing – motionless. It lies underneath a lava of
silence woven with noiseless steps rustling softly because they flow out
of that hospital in which all the slippers are made of felt.
That landscape, that mental hospital, that asylum of our age, has sowed
its traces everywhere, even across the sea. As relics, as fossils of our history,
they emerge, in one shape or another, they emerge daily and create
enormous horrors which make one vomit.
For instance, those jars.
Those jars that don’t contain imagined yet existing humanoid creatures
shaped in the silence of literary musings, people who, for centuries now,
have been creating a sinister noise, those jars in which years before they
should have started stacking, preserving, and hermetically closing specimens
of the long ago befouled human species, as punishment; those jars
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