Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2004 - Ljudmila

Krzysztof Varga
Karolina
Extract
That desperate summer I didn’t travel at all, except on routes so familiar
that they bored me to death, taken by the buses (usually in the morning)
and the cabs (mainly in the evening). After all, I was only familiar with
one journey, and there was nothing at either end of it – at one extreme
there was the utter desolation of my flat, which hadn’t been cleaned for
ages, at the other the perfectly amorphous nothingness of my exhausting
job. And there I was, stuck in the middle of these two absurdities: apparently
in motion, but immobilised, moving from place to place, but constantly
in the same spot. Anyway, I wasn’t aiming for any great heights,
not counting the tiring conquest of the stairs up to the second floor of
my office block, which seemed to get higher every day – I definitely felt
myself having to surmount more and more, steeper and steeper steps on
this arduous climb. Instead of wallowing in warm sea water, I was wallowing
in my own defeat, which seemed not just shallower and less undulating,
but also saturated with a nauseatingly sticky taste.
So there was really nowhere for me to come back from, not counting
the embarrassment of returning home each day, which was completely
unmemorable, a record of nothing but accumulated, formatted, pre-packaged
enfeeblement. And I wasn’t eating any exquisite Oriental dishes at
ethnic restaurants, nor was I making any for myself. I wasn’t devoting
myself to culinary ingenuity or joyful hedonism, I wasn’t saying »sharp,
mild, sweet-and-sour, well done, spicy, not too fatty«. I, the former glutton,
the archetypal sybarite, wasn’t even setting foot in the places where
once I used to stuff my stomach and torture my bowels without mercy.
Now, in the oppressive, hellish heat, in the Satanic sunshine, all I ate was
ice cream. I tried every single kind. On hot days, which were quite unbearable
in the steaming, over-heated city, I ate fruit-flavoured ices: watery
lemon sorbets, apricot and pear ices, and best of all strawberry, blueberry
and cherry. On cooler days – now and then there was one, though
it never brought the slightest relief – I chose fruit & nut, walnut and chocolate
ices. When the weather was mixed, half baking and half chilly, or
even half dry and half rainy – sometimes I was surprised in mid-step by
sudden rainfall that left almost no trace of itself behind, or a short, furious
but fruitless storm that I’d watch resignedly as I sheltered in a gateway
– on those days I ate mixed ices, usually strawberry and walnut,
though sometimes I set my sights on bolder compositions, trying out new
flavours in the process: plum or pineapple, cinnamon and truffle, I investigated
new combinations, and with rare intensity I took on the role of a
taster, though in fact it demands inner calm and consideration. I was the
unhurried passer-by who can never be on time, the eternally belated
flaneur, uttering coarse oaths – originality had long since deserted me –
in a cab trapped in a traffic jam. I was searching for a world full of sublime
essays on Italian museums, though all I could hear was the rumble of
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