The Collector of Names (11 page)

Max took a sip for strength and said:

"Maybe they're so behind, maybe they're bonkers, maybe they're..., how do you call it..., honest?"

"Oh, I don't think so. They can't all be weirdos!" Alfonz shook his head. "No, no!"

Raf was quite grateful to him for his support.

"Look," said Max," when my father came to see the place, the key hung from a nail in the doorframe on the outside! How mad he was when he saw that! Look, they’ve got the sort of monument that everywhere else was got rid of ages ago. Except maybe somewhere in the middle of Siberia, eh? Maybe they're frightened of each other and nobody dares steal. In a village like that everybody knows about everything everybody else gets up to!"

"No, Max, that's not right. They could have all been in on it and taken everything out of the house and nobody would have known."

"Raf, don't talk rubbish! These peasants can't even agree on what time of day it is, otherwise they'd know by now how far behind they are!"

He was overcome by laughter which he interrupted only for his last remark:

"Anyway, what do we care about them anyway? Are we here to party or to attend a summer school for prospective detectives, eh? Ha!"

Raf nodded and gave in. There was no point in going on, but he still thought it was odd. He pushed the puzzle to the back of his mind but only after he had noticed that Alfonz looked like somebody who was getting ready to mention something which bothered him a lot. He opened his mouth a few times, looking towards the cellar (why there?) but when he heard Max asking if anybody else had any other crap to discuss, Alfonz shut up. After the bottle travelled around the circle again, Alfonz started talking, but Raf was certain it was not what he was going to mention earlier. He was telling them about somebody from his village who was a thief and was found out. Raf started listening, first with one and then both ears. He had always liked cruel stories.

*

Their voices travelled around the cellar, in a gentle murmur and it seemed as if the sound was coming from the names on the ceiling.

*

Samo stretched his fingers and took hold of the bottle. He could have cracked it in his hands if he wanted to. Just crushed it with his fingers. He glanced around and all his friends seemed busy. Raf and Alfonz were talking. Max was messing around with the cassette player, turning the cassette and cursing and swearing.

Samo squeezed the bottle. Not too much, just a bit. He could feel the glass under his skin and he was hooked. He always avoided alcohol in bottles or glasses because whenever he took a sip from something made of glass it always aroused in him a desire which he found hard to resist. To squeeze, to crush. His muscles would flex, the liquid would splash, his blood would flow freely. When it was all mixed up on the floor it would be impossible to say which was wine and which used to be a part of him.

But he would not do it that night. He would not. Only once had he lost control of himself in the presence of others, and they had taken it as proof of his hard-to-control strength. They bandaged his hand with a handkerchief and took him to the doctor's. An accident.

Yes.

It was just like what was to him the saddest parting imaginable: the cutting of his nails. He would lock himself in the bathroom, open a newspaper, kneel down and do the business with the little scissors incorporated in his Swiss army knife. Whenever a nail or a fragment of it flew across the bathroom he never gave up until he found it and put it next to the others on the newspaper. When he had finished, he would pick up the paper and get up slowly without moving his eyes away from the crescents. Slowly he would let them slide into the toilet, look at them once more and then flush the toilet. They disappeared in the whirlpool! They no longer existed! Parts of him that used to be and then ceased to be. On him or anywhere else. Or maybe they were everywhere! Somewhere where his mind could not follow.

This was a shock which he needed to live through again and again.

He had just a hint of the same feeling when he had his hair cut and when he defecated, but only a hint, like a shadow, a brief flash, a thought. But nails..., how shocked he had been when he first read that nails continued to grow after death! So independent - neither one’s brain nor one’s willpower could control them. Even when everything else stops, they just go on. In death and beyond. Whenever he heard about the afterlife he always thought of nails.

He put the bottle back on the table. Alfonz and Raf were laughing, the cassette player had chewed up Max's tape and he was trying to rewind it with his finger, cursing incessantly.

Samo concentrated on the bottle, trying to break it with his eyes. It did not work, it never did. He liked watching films about people whose strength was all in their eyes. Not like his dad's eyes, which seemed like a sheep's eyes ever since he could remember. Together with his moaning about Samo's mother who had left them - she had just walked out. So what? He was sure nobody else had such a wimp for a father. He was all bowels and fat, that was what he was built of. And those eyes... A man should never be such a weed. So, even if he had to spend hours and hours lifting weights, feel the sweat leaving his pores - a sweet feeling, another part of him leaving! - he must never be like his father.

Women: they come and go. It was never possible to understand them so it was better to keep away from them. That was why he was always just accompanying Max on his adventures and never took part in anything that went on but always managed to stage a retreat just in time. It did not matter to him that he was still a virgin. Manhood was about self-control, not about giving yourself to others.

He grabbed the bottle, turned it upside down and took a big gulp, as quickly as he could to avoid temptation.

*

There was no sign of Ana. Aco squeezed his hands into fists and took a deep breath.

How much longer could he wait? Maybe at that very moment one of the boys was walking down to the cellar, looking up, noticing the names and starting to read them out. Some stuck in his throat and he would try to pronounce them out loud.

Louder.

Would anything happen? What Aco had seen years ago looked like a beginning, a preparation.

A trap.

He had two feelings simultaneously: yes, it would happen and he would be too late.

*

The pensioners were no longer sitting on the bench. They must have gone to bed as there was nothing else for them to do. She should really get back. She did not have a watch but it felt late. The two fishing boats had set off and the bay was filled with the noise of their engines. She waited on the pier until the noise became just a reminder of the presence of the ships which had already disappeared out of sight.

Her best friend had said to her: the uncle you are going to stay with is probably similar to your parents. The first evening is the most important one. If you go to bed early, then he will expect you to go to bed early for the rest of your holiday. The rules have to be established straight away and they have to be established by you.

Ana had always admired her friend's decisiveness, but she did not approve of her insulting attitude towards her parents.

But her advice was not bad.

She stopped on the junction between the way to her uncle's and the way to the monument. She looked at its shiny outline and again it seemed very ugly to her.

She went closer.

*

Aco put on black clothes. He stood in front of the mirror and slowly and with great care did up all the buttons on his shirt and tightened the belt on his trousers. He pushed his hair under a black beret and smiled bitterly at himself as he said goodbye to his image. Vain to the very end, he thought.

He went back to the kitchen table and started writing a note. The first word was Ana's name.

When he was finished he put it in the middle of the table, under the light.

She would not miss it.

He went over to the photograph and picked it up. He looked at it and then kissed it.

"Thank you," he said before putting it back down.

He unlocked the cabinet. Deep in thought, he slid the palm of his hand over the shotguns standing upright, then lowered his eyes to the pistols arranged under the guns. He chose an officer's beretta, checked it carefully, inserted the chamber, put bullets into the barrel and put the weapon in his pocket.

Just before he reached the door, he allowed his eyes to say goodbye to all the little everyday things that he was so used to that he normally never even noticed them.

When he looked at Jesus on the cross in the corner - which had been put there by his parents (or grandparents?) and where he had been, out of respect for them not him, lighting candles for all those years just because they used to do it - he crossed himself. His hand just did it automatically and he let it, even though he knew it would not make any difference.

Jesus had nothing to do with it all and the Saviour would not be able to save one single soul from Hell's gates that night.

*

Max took a long sip from the bottle and belched.

"This is the business," he said. He wanted to repeat the procedure but he managed to stop himself. If he got drunk then he would throw up in half an hour and cry ten minutes later. He remembered his father's lecture and immediately added the fact that they were on a more or less deserted island, a few hundred kilometres away from his father and that surely he did not have to watch his behaviour.

He continued with the interrupted move. He would have to go for a piss soon, he was the only one who had not been to sprinkle the grass yet.

The tape had just reached the end of a song, the audience started clapping and the singer thanked them:

"You're beautiful!"

That made Max laugh loudly.

*

Aco stopped just for a moment in the middle of the harbour and looked around. There was no sign of Ana. Where could she have gone? He looked towards the bar and the empty bench and restrained himself. It was best to do what he had decided earlier. He had to go and check it out himself first. He did not really know anything for sure, there was just this desperate feeling of doom and gloom forcing him into the night. It would probably all turn out to be nothing.

There was no need to go and wake up his comrades.

He crossed the square and started walking up the hill.

It made him angry when he realised that he was saying goodbye to the houses and everything around them just like he had earlier said goodbye to his home.

*

Smoke started coming from the wooden crate and there was a barely detectable tremor on the surface of its strange contents. Not as if something inside had moved, but as if somebody had sighed.

*

Ana stood next to the tank, on the side facing the sea. At first, she wanted just to walk around it, to waste as much time as she could and then she stopped in front of the trap-door and she trembled. No, there was no danger, she was just managing to frighten herself. She often did that with her friend. They would tell each other horror stories and soon they would both be scared to death.

She imagined the lid suddenly opening and a man's head popping up, his eyes gleaming, on his head the sort of cap she saw tank-drivers wearing in films. A leather one, with headphones or whatever it was that covered their ears.

With headphones?

Her fear suddenly subsided and the trap-door remained firmly shut.

With headphones? was that possible?

She pictured herself on the ferry, the rail, the white wall, the seagull in the air. A figure walking away from her, soon to disappear behind the corner.

Was it possible? Could something so silly really have happened?

She ran her fingers through her hair, touching her ears. Maybe he had spoken to her, but she had not heard him?

Too silly. But... His look as she was getting off the ferry. Offended?

Oh, men, they're always sulking about something or other, at least that was what her schoolfriends said.

What if...

She would go and look for him and ask him. She would come up with an excuse for going to the other side of the island in spite of her uncle's strange behaviour. She would ask somebody else for directions, they could not all be strange.

She went back to the path leading towards the village. Only a few houses still had lights on, the others were lit only by the moon. For a moment, she thought she could see something moving among the first trees on the slope but when she looked closer she could not see anything.

*

Max shouted:

"Alfonz, Serious Alfonz! Go and get the drink! We're running out of everything."

Alfonz got up obediently, took the torch from his rucksack lying next to the wall and left the dining room. The cassette player was screeching its tune, Samo was staring at the bottle in his hand thinking, and Raf was wondering why he had come in the first place. He had known exactly how it would all look and he was not wrong. Why did we do predictable things? Because that was when any unforeseen event turned out to be really exciting?

Oh balls, he said and reached for the bottle.

*

Alfonz went into the cellar and remembered the fear which had attacked him when he first went in. He stepped very carefully onto the fourth step but there was just a very faint repetition of what had happened earlier - it was not like an attack this time, it just seemed as if he had gone through a broken shell. Whatever it was, the danger had passed. He continued his descent and three vivid images appeared simultaneously. They were so real that it seemed as if he was actually there that very moment. Alone in the middle of the pine forest. In church just as the altar boy waves the censer. By the village road onto which the workers had just spread the hot asphalt, getting it ready for the roller. He stood in the middle of the stairs, manically shining the torch all around him. Everything looked just like it did at his first visit. But...