***

I start writing in the train on the way from Point A to Point B, going from a little seaside town to Berlin, I gaze out the window at the remains of the city, at the unfinished houses on the outskirts, at the industrial warehouses and the stunted trees along the river, torn plastic bags hang like bats from the branches, it’s hard to be in this train car, it’s hard to be in this skin, in the role of a passenger, I’ve forgotten how to travel, how to surrender to the favor and the misfortune of the railway, how to say goodbye, how long one actually stands facing backwards watching Point A disappear swiftly, how long they stand stand stand stand then and look at nothing, will they start to cry? I open my notebook, but I have no answer, I write “on the way from Point A to Point B, going from a little seaside town to Berlin, I gaze out the window at the remains of the city, at the unfinished houses on the outskirts, at the industrial warehouses and the stunted trees along the river…” and so on, I write the only way I know how, spinning and meandering around what hurts the most and what there’s no help for, because behind my back it’s shrinking to nothing, I dig through last summer, I dig through last winter, I dig through the fall before that, too, lose myself in the sameness of those identical days, come back to afternoons spent on a damp bed sheet, at death’s door from a hangover, to hangovers caused by depression, to the depression caused by failure, boredom, the countryside, as well as by the lack of any skill to use my sorrow to produce my masterpiece, I listen to my own silence that the seasons pass through, that everything goes to hell through while I’m dying on the tenth on the hundredth on the two-hundredth day in a row and from my bed I watch the shadows that crawl into the room through the cracks in the blinds, stretch across the ceiling, and drip down the empty white walls, I do nothing else, just look at the light on the walls or at the colors on the parquet or at my toes, too wooden to move, I waste years this way, I have no purpose, I leave no trace, except for newspaper articles that only describe human misery and are accordingly miserably paid, she smokes in the kitchen, looking out the window all the while, like I’m doing now, looking at the nothing that we’ve reduced ourselves to and she waits and waits and waits for me to leave which I take an eternity to do, because I take the liberty of procrastinating, of staring at those walls, the parquet and my toes, of feeling sorry for myself and repeating that there’s no space there for me, just like there’s no space for me anywhere, how I seek nothing and want nothing, except to write, but I can’t and can’t and can’t do even that, that’s why I keep quiet, even though that silence leaves its scars on no one but her, no one misses the books I haven’t written but me, that’s our life, that was our life, that was last week, those were our days, that was my corpse in the apartment I blamed my inhospitality on, but I never left it, she called it a lair, though she never really let it turn into a lair, she cleaned it, she cooked and decorated the shelves with cacti, she tried, unsuccessfully, to be more cheerful, I didn’t try anything, I kept myself going with the idea that I was just passing through, that I sought nothing and expected nothing from her, and so I was not responsible for her dissatisfaction, I looked for excuses and took the gruff freedom a man takes from a woman, the freedom she apparently didn’t need, I acted like that man and tried to make her that woman, one from whom my leaving would take the right to connection and the reason for her unhappiness, in a lair, in the company of a depressed drunkard, a so-called writer, a supposed journalist, between my cups and her ashtrays, in conditions that more peaceful souls would call the abyss that most people lived in, and the abyss most people lived in had become our habit, our decade, her third cigarette in a row lit without thinking, automatic, as she watches the silent scenes in the windows across the way that remind her of what we had never become, as she watches our neighbors’ harmonious choreography showing that they don’t need to sidestep each other just to survive, in their rooms decorated with books and pictures, organized and intended to last, versus our neglected rooms that silently counted on our impermanence, versus our silences that we feared to break so we wouldn’t hurt each other, versus our fear of the end that surely overtook our every gesture, breath, and cigarette, to that galloping defeat of a love that would surrender without a fight, without any negotiations, in the throes of death, which is why every shared moment we had crossed its fingers behind its back, which is why we had stopped trying, I lay down and read the news, lay down and stared at wartime photos, lay down and perished, supine, in all of those wars, lay down and asked myself how long, the pages in my notebook were all blank, except the ones where I’d written SOS and lay back down in that bed, I slept in it, drank, ate, jerked off, died, but I never got up, she smoked and suffered, cried sometimes, she translated other people’s books, staying longer and longer in other people’s heads and other people’s languages, we stayed as far apart as possible, she couldn’t get closer to me, just as I couldn’t get closer to her, we had already been complete strangers for a long time when she said what she said, between two puffs of smoke, when I rose at last from the bed and did what so many times I had threatened I would do, I left, I saved us both, because I couldn’t listen as she delivered her great big “I don’t love you,” a beautifully-crafted sentence I’ll never forget: “I don’t love you, I don’t associate my inner workings with you, I don’t count on your body even when I am feeling loneliest, I don’t believe in our photographs even when we’re smiling in them,” so that, well, I’d understand that I had no right to stay any longer, which had really taken me much too long to grasp, so I finally went from Point A to Point B, ashamed of the peace she’d suffered my presence with while I’d been certain that I was the one suffering hers, I said, “about ten days,” and in fact I’d needed just ten days to leave and find myself there—in the train that was climbing towards the northeastern continent, still embracing her in my imagination at the station where she hadn’t shown up—the mind I’d brought with me was an apartment I needed to leave, take out the trash, repaint the walls and leave the keys behind, I needed to start back over, start from zero, start from yesterday, resign myself to the fact that the inventory of all the past years wouldn’t amount to anything anyway: “what are the tangible remains of our relationships, except ephemeral feelings and scattered time?” a friend asked me, “we’ve come into strange times where there’s no value held in anything except the capitalization of everything that exists, even relationships, and now the question hangs over us in neon: what have we contributed all these years to our society?” we contributed nothing, fortunately, not even a child, the tangible capital of our decade is the fourth page I write as the train takes me to Germany, the day is somber, already drenched in rain at dawn, I’m trying to find a way to describe it, to return my thoughts to it, I’m trying to find a voice in myself in tone and rhythm that would suit the damp and the grey of the landscape we’re passing through, that in the end would suit me, the man I became when I lay down, a voice that could calmly report on fires and ruins and departures, a voice that would know a bit more than I do, for example, why things happen the way they do or why we couldn’t be happy or why we say about a man that he left when he’s actually been driven away, what’s that elegance all about? the same voice that I’ve been searching for years for, not bent over my notebook, but looking at nothing, looking drunkenly at nothing, looking hung over at nothing, hoping for a groundbreaking moment that would cover the first page in writing, I thought it was when I found a chain in my palm with the medallion my father had worn on his chest, it had come in the mail in a padded yellow envelope, it was sent to me after he died in the shack that shared a wall with a pig pen on the hill he guarded with a rifle, they only found him two weeks after his liver had failed, when the starving pigs had already eaten his feet, they took off his chain and sent it to me with a clipping from the local newspaper that said he was buried properly, I don’t know how they found me, but they found me, I hadn’t expected that it would hurt, but it hurt me terribly, above all the emptiness where there ought to have been some sort of unforgettable moment we shared, I did remember our last meeting, his bloodshot eyes and that medallion on his chest, he patted me on the back and repeated, “son… son… son…” he didn’t ask about my brother, didn’t ask about my mother, maybe he had forgotten that she existed, maybe he wouldn’t even have remembered me if I hadn’t called my name at least ten times as I climbed the hill despite the warnings from the locals that he might shoot, there was a beating in my temples, he didn’t shoot, when I finally made it, he knew who I was, he even smiled, he had no teeth, I expected that after so many years he would say something important, he didn’t tell me anything, we got drunk, which I did again when the letter arrived, I got the obituary ready, hung the chain around my neck and got drunk, maybe his death could have made me put myself back together, to start to write, to try, as she used to tell me, “just a little,” but it didn’t, I was drunk when she told me that she didn’t love me, between two puffs of smoke and the trembling movement as she tapped her cigarette over the ashtray, “for how long?” “a long time,” “how long?” “I don’t know,” I didn’t ask her anything else, fuck it, I should have hated her, for some reason it seemed like it would have been easier that way to get over the fact that, aside from her, there was no one else who loved me, I’d long since lost track of my brother, and I hadn’t visited my mother in years, I’d phone her and share thrilling details of the made-up story I called my life, I was scared to ring at her door and see an old woman I’d failed to give anything back to, who, really, I wouldn’t be able to lie to so deftly in person, I didn’t want to prove her right when she had said, often, “you can’t blame me for anything,” I was old enough to recognize a part of what I had once resented in her in myself, but I looked for the voice inside that I’d be able to write with to say, for example, that I didn’t care if I said goodbye, I looked for it unceasingly, everywhere, and that’s how I came here, to seat number thirty-two in the train that will take the whole night to get to Munich, where I’ll transfer to Berlin, where I’m traveling to, refusing to put a name to any goal except, at last, to leave, to fill up my notebook, to write without premeditation like letters written to dear friends, and I’ll find the voice that’ll be my reflection in the mirror, where I stand now totally alone since my mother passed away unobtrusively, arranging all the details of her burial in advance, she even left money for the wreath, the agency took care of the cleaning and sale of the apartment, in the end I never even went through her door, I didn’t walk through the apartment, I didn’t stop the clock that kept on ticking even after her time was up, I didn’t open her closets, though I could imagine the layers of arranged bed sheets and towels that smelled like fabric warmed by an iron, I didn’t breathe in the smell she left behind her, I only asked the agency as they were cleaning to take care of the photographs, they gave me a flat box with Christmas patterns on the lid, I still haven’t gotten around to opening it, but yesterday I packed my suitcase and left, no one brought me to the station, I didn’t kiss anyone goodbye, I didn’t wave to anyone, in the apartment her imaginary body bent over the table, unmoving as furniture, we had been like a bed and a closet made of solid oak, we took up space, nothing else, but I left, didn’t I, and now I’ll change my city, I’ll change my language, I’ll change my head, and when I’ve spent my savings, I’ll find something that counts as a job for some money and strip myself of ambitions, I’ll try, at least a little, to open up my notebook, fill it with tiny handwriting and in so doing say goodbye, I’ll grind our oak to dust, just as I’d always tried to do, but the sentences had crawled across the white insides like ants in more or less the same variations, automatic, out of habit, giving shape to nothing and nobody, not saying goodbye to anything, I couldn’t write over again what had vanished and become a person who admits failure or leaves without hard feelings, a person who from now on could work under the table in some bakery in Kreuzberg or wander through Grunewald, a person who writes books in secret but won’t kill himself if he doesn’t write them, he won’t, he doesn’t care, “does that make sense?” I asked the friend if it made sense to leave, he answered that he was jealous of me, he called me to ask if I’d already bought my ticket, my cell phone rang while we sat in a café with a view over the cityscape, we were silent over our two espressos as though we didn’t care, she nodded to me to answer the call, I answered and kept studying her profile, soon I wouldn’t be able to anymore, I told him I was leaving tomorrow, she didn’t react at all, her gaze was lost in the bay, because of the pollution no one swam there anymore, there were no more tourists or fish, the sea was just a postcard picture without anything happening inside, then she drank her coffee and left, her back bent into a bow once more as she lit a cigarette in front of the café, “we’re not together anymore,” I repeated to him as she walked away, like I couldn’t believe it, I spent the morning leaving paper notes with messages in her things, but I wouldn’t admit that to him, I was ashamed, “we’re not together anymore, this town is just keeping us together a little longer.”

The novel was translated from Croatian by Rachael Daum.

The book The Story of a Man Who Collapsed Into His Notebook was published as part of the Growing Together project, co-financed by the European Union.

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