Flisar A Swarm of Dust

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-912545-10-0
Verlag: Istros Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 190 Seiten

'A world without truth would be an immensely sad place,' states the magistrate in the murder trial of local boy, Janek. A young man with serious mental issues, Janek weaves a 'chestnut crown' from the leaves of a supposedly sacred tree in a attempt to rid himself of the demons of the past through a pagan ceremony. The crown is later found on the body of the farmer Geder - stabbed to death with a bread knife. Through a series of flashbacks during the subsequent interrogations, we learn of Janek's story: from the perversion of his relationship with his mother, to the frustrations of his love affair with Daria and his inability to complete his studies or free himself from the ghosts which haunt him. A Swarm of Dust is widely considered to be one of Flisar's finest works of fiction, questioning the very notion of objective truth and subverting the norms of Judeo-Christian morality.

EVALD FLISAR is a novelist, playwright, essayist, editor and seasoned traveller. Flisar was president of the Slovene Writers' Association from 1995 - 2002, and since 1998 is the editor of the oldest Slovenian literary journal Sodobnost (Contemporary Review). He is the author of eleven novels, two collections of short stories, three travelogues, two books for children and fifteen stage plays. Winner of the Pre?eren Foundation Prize, the highest state award for prose and drama, the prestigious ?upan?i? Award for lifetime achievement, three awards for Best Radio Play, and many more. His previous novels, 'My Father's Dreams and Three Loves, One Death were published with Istros in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Flisar, Evald

Leseproben

PART TWO

Seven years later, in Ljubljana, he was walking towards the castle that seemed to float in the air like a silhouette, but he wasn’t entirely convinced that he was walking along the road. He could feel firm ground beneath his feet, while alongside him ran hazy lines that might have been the edges of the road, yet his sense of the hardness beneath his feet came and went. One moment it was stronger, the next it faded, and at times it disappeared altogether. Then he felt nothing. There was a mist before his eyes, in his ears. His thoughts were sinking as into a deep swamp: not a muddy one; more like quicksand. The only thing he could register was the fluctuating rise and fall of the temperature of his blood. It swung from incredible heat to intense cold, and was different in different parts of his body at the same time. As if he had his right hand in boiling water, his left hand in ice. And so he could neither evaluate the strength of his feelings nor identify their exact location.

He had no sense of time and could not determine how long this absence lasted, this sinking into his own blood. When the temperature fluctuations stabilised, he first of all felt his hearing becoming clearer. He could hear a church choir in the distance, accompanied by an organ, it sounded hollow, as if echoing off the walls of a deep well. The music flowed over him like the waves of hot and cold had before, then it began to settle and intensify, to float. And then the organ keys came to the fore, louder and sharper and crisper. Finally it was all repeated in an even tone. Then there was a sound like human steps. As the sound came nearer, it seemed to him again that he was walking along the road and the hollow steps he could hear were his own.

Almost at the same time, his sight began to clear. The mist condensed into patches and withdrew: to the left and right there were sometimes pulses of flashing light. He thought perhaps they were puddles and that sunlight was reflecting off their surface. But the mist did not lift completely, so he saw nothing with any clarity. The world intruded on him, but not as sharply as to awaken his tired, sunken thoughts. He had a slight feeling that things were moving in a particular direction, that they were going only forwards and not backwards or in many different directions at once. Objects swam around him like balloons, floating above and behind him, circling, approaching and retreating, sometimes seeming to swarm together. The whole time his perceptions remained coarse, hazy. Nothing around him changed, but rather moved at a certain distance, and if they did come nearer they did so only as outlines, never clearly visible. He perceived the reality around him, but found no connection between the outlines and himself. It was as if he was excluded from the real world; as if he could not touch things; as if he was floating on his own, to an extent determined by the flow of his blood, and that things were also floating independently, without contact with him, remaining outside him.

At such moments, more frequent in recent years, a wild restlessness always gripped him, the urge to leap and bang and hurl things around and smash them. He was aware of these feelings, but he never worked out at what level of withdrawal they occurred. Nor could he ever push them away, they had to disappear on their own. They were like pain, and his will was irrelevant. Whenever they appeared, his heartbeat increased, something reminiscent of extreme joy arose in his chest, a yell, but he was also full of other, very different feelings – hatred of his surroundings, wantonness, a craving for violence – he himself called it a craving for violence and nothing more, because he always had to take hold of something and break it, he had to rush around the room and shout and bang his feet on the floor, and only then could he calm down. But at times the attack would be so strong that he was left trembling when it passed. Sometimes he looked with relish at the windowpane and thought how it would be to smash his fist through it and reduce it to fragments – what a sense of relief he would feel! Mostly the mere thought of the act was enough.

He thought that perhaps the attic room where he was staying was at fault: There wasn’t a day when he didn’t look out the window and see rain. His view was hemmed in by blackened, lichen-covered roofs, which spread into the hillside at strange angles. This was the old part of town and buildings clung to the slope like rotten grapes. If he wanted to see the sky he had to lean far out of the window. But he never did so, he got used to there being no sky in this part of town. As the roofs clustered in front of the glass pane, dusk came early and if it was raining, it was already hard to make out objects at four in the afternoon. There was also a constant noise from the gutter. The rain quietly pattered; not heavy, not a downpour, but more like a grey curtain, every day. Its falling cast a strange silence, which crept through the window, climbed the dark walls, across the low hanging ceiling. The silence irritated him. With the silence came a sense of remoteness, bodily spasms, the urge to destroy.

In one such mood he saw a cat climbing up an almost vertical roof, trying to claw its way to the top. But the roof was slippery, the cat slipped and rolled towards the edge; it tried to grab hold of the gutter, but was unable to and tumbled into the deep yard below, where it lay almost immobilised. When Janek saw this he felt a strange delight, which scared him since he was unable to explain it. But it brought relief: as if he’d been choking and then suddenly breathed air.

After everything remained unchanged for some time, his hearing became sharper again. The first time he noticed it was with the sound of his footsteps. Whereas before they had sounded as if at a distance, now they were right beneath him, very close, and they rattled through his legs towards his stomach. At first, this rattling did not cause him any pain. At every step the shock slid to his stomach, but it took the form of a sound rather than pain. For some time he was suffused with the sound of footsteps.

He suddenly had the feeling that the shocks were caused by the earth. As if the street was pressing hard on his soles, like a fist from below. He was slipping from his floating state and becoming ever heavier. The blows from the earth took the form of pain and he felt very clearly that in spite of the unpleasant feeling his weight was not being pulled down, into the earth, but that the earth was pressing against him. The blows became increasingly intense until he felt as if the ground was beating his feet. Because his thoughts were still mired in quicksand, he did not know how to put all this into words. The ground was neither warm nor cold, there were no specific feelings, nothing that could be defined. It neither burned, nor stung, nor hurt, nor pricked; everything was concentrated in the fact that he could feel the ground, and the feeling was intensifying. Instinctively, he lifted his feet high, wanting to keep them in the air as long as possible, then he began to jump, his feet twitching as if they were bouncing off the ground. The ground was becoming flexible, but his legs were going numb. It felt as if he wasn’t moving at all, rather that the ground beneath him was wrinkling, folding and giving way, forming waves and washing him forward like water washes a small leaf. A vague awareness that he was running arose. His hearing failed again, the focus of his awareness shifted to his legs, which were numb, right up to his hips, as if they were not part of him. His sight was still functioning to some extent and with its help the spark of realisation that he was running, for the balloon-like objects around him were whizzing past more rapidly. They were crammed together in greater density, merging together and swimming from one field of vision to another. Only when he began to be assailed through the swarm of balloon-like objects by a sharper light – ever sharper – did he clearly feel he was lifting and putting down his feet in rapid succession. The light was stopping him, his hearing was triggered and he suddenly heard again that he was gasping for breath: his chest was heaving, and he felt his hair clinging to his sweaty forehead. The ground slid beneath him, rotated and stopped. Again it seemed to him that it was his legs that were moving, or rather had been moving, for the next moment they stopped again.

Whenever Daria was with him things unfolded in a similar way. Lust quickly peaked, his tendons flexed, he was gripped by a desire to throw himself at her and strike or bite or pull her hair if she was lying on the couch thinking, or perhaps dozing. Beneath the cover she was naked, for she never dressed until she had decided to leave. The thought of her nakedness always held him back, stopped him throwing himself on her, caused him to listen. Usually she was breathing very lightly. At such moments he would not touch her skin. His lust began to wane as soon as he occupied himself with the question of why her skin still excited him. Before falling asleep they always talked. She asked questions and he answered. Sometimes she seemed pushy, because she kept raking over his past, petulantly, as if it was of immense importance to her to know what had happened to him at different times. But lust always appeared when she was already asleep, when the room was at peace, which was intensified by the pattering of rain. Only then did he sink into the darkness from which he had previously been expelled.

Before him was a road, now he could see it clearly. He realised he was soaked in sweat, rivulets ran from his forehead, he was tousled, he was breathing deeply, he was...