THE CHANNELLING OF THE ELEMENTAL SPIRIT When the sun perishes on the western catafalque and night hangs over its black body over the earth, Isav Karabas feels the need to be outside. The blue globe in the window of his hotel room becomes ever bluer in the light he turns on. The momentary ambiguity arising due to the choosing of clothes to wear for his outing, acquired around lunch time when shopping, is obviated by his sense of the beautiful penetrating to the surface of his, of the beautiful deprived, personality. The evening lacking in the matter of company is compensated by his mood. The optimism he shows toward his immediate future is derived from his conviction that he’s finally found a destination for himself. Carried by the current of uncorrupted joy his gaze reveals possibilities till then denied him. All the forms of that new state he is now in he knows from before, only they have previously in his life existed solely as a feeling, something he has then portended, but which has never materialized as that better tomorrow, never till now. To keep himself in such a state he doesn’t want to pass, particularly not to be forgotten, Isav turns his back to all he’s been through. He refuses, the fellow, for the rage and malice to keep him alive, in their stead he now places the boons of oblivion. Though he’s in all those, why not call them misfortunes, taken part, they, those misfortunes, have not taken part in him, more precisely, haven’t caused his change. Karabas has remained his own man in spite of the world which isn’t its own of old; he as yet exists as none among the people whose affiliation is determined in advance. So, slowly those prospects he had dreamed of much are becoming true in the sense that they’re nearing their realization, which he, though of a progressive spirit, hadn’t the guts to assume. All that unravels and goes on in Isav himself, in a person remaining a person in spite of the imperative of uniting and the mutating bekining of individuals for the purpose of the preservation of species and breed from complete debacle and decay of the abstraction of life in which one survives thanks to the collective, while the world outside him remains the same: the city looks the same when he gazes out the window; the same are the streets as are the people in them the same as yesterday, as they will be tomorrow; there is no difference in that surrounding him; that now making him one with his surroundings and returning his life into harmony with his environment is his elemental spirit, that which makes him a man. The yellow lights of the street lighting barely reach his floor. Along the border where happiness becomes the mocking of life he rises and stands before the mirror, returning in his sound mind to the transient reality. Sweat penetrates his forehead and dews his brows. Frowning, he departs for the bathroom and washes his face spangled with drops of water. He’s careful not to wet his new shirt and jacket appearing more beautiful in the mirror than without it. The elemental spirit dictates to him to extend his arms before himself, so he does. The elemental spirit demands that he resolve his mind toward that which he sees in the mirror. The elemental spirit accepts criticism, but not one derived from self-pity and the lack of self-confidence it deems counterproductive. Isav’s looking at his reflection and sees gall no more, the mark of an expelled man disappears from his face far from bleak and sad. The feeling that, in fact, his family has left him, and not he his family, is relieved by a, resembling a firm boulder, feeling of the elemental spirit whispering to him the tales of his future where there is no man who is more in harmony with his spirit then Isav, there exists no individual who from the miserable experiences comes out reborn to the point of the abnormal clashing with the occasional bleakness of living, and all thanks to that spirit. The elemental spirit knows the byways and blind alleys, traps where those of a weak will leave their better prospects, as it knows shortcuts to reconciliation with the imperative of life which, precisely due to its necessity, seems burdensome, especially to one whose life is sweetened by the bitterness of those who don’t accept it as it is. The elemental spirit is a propitiator of extremes. Its many currents connect the neglected part of Isav and the part allied with the remainder of humanity. It is a transit state of Isav Karabas. Guided by the cognition of the fleetingness of happiness, and in order to keep in the newly found state, he quickly brings to a close his preparations for an outing, turns off the light and abandons his room. By lift he descends into the foyer, now all notice him: the guests of the hotel directing smiling glances at him; the staff giving him passing comments whose purpose is to gain his favours. He deposits the room key at the reception and passes through the door as the people waiting to enter let him by. He sets onto the sidewalk and accedes to the curb. He raises his arm and whistles so the cab immediately stops, and Milijash braces up behind the wheel and sees Karabas sitting on the back seat of the vehicle. Ozren turns on the engine and proceeds to follow Isav’s cab at an unsuspicious distance. They’re going toward the river, but are far from it as yet. The cab stops at the traffic light and Milijash follows it, nestling his front bumper to it. Before him, he sees Karabas’s scruff and shoulders, thus licks his lips and swallows spit. Isav doesn’t turn around, as if he’s absent, and there’s someone else riding in the cab, but Ozren is focused on him, he knows him and doubts not his identity as he faltered in that regard at breakfast while he was cajoling Karabas to return to his wife and son. They come to the Danube and turn left, hence down the Sunchani Wharf and past the Zeppelin restaurant where last night he approached Isav for the first time. They brake onto the bridge and it becomes clear to Milijash that Karabas is headed for the fortress. The river is dark and runs, not letting voice as is the sky grim and quiet, low along the ground. The fortress appears on the other bank; it’s becoming ever larger and burly, growing before the eyes as if swallowing the gaze getting lost in its walls. The taxi meter ticks away the cost of the ride. The driver is quiet, and Isav mutes on the back seat. From the receiver there are heard voices from the headquarters and other vehicles. They’re at the bridge’s end. The right bank of the river is dark as if it has sprouted in wilderness. The cab slows down and turns straight into the fortress, hence climbing up the meandering road. Behind it Ozren’s car is following, as yet unsuspicious as they move in a file of three-four automobiles scudding up the mild acclivity. The ramparts appear frightening. They’re thick and black, but on the headlight’s beams they change colour and Karabas’s percept, from the horrifying, acquires their practical, engineering purpose. The nature of all surrounding him reveals itself in his elemental spirit and that nature acquires quite an everyday appearance than it would seem to Isav if that spirit were not. The road narrows and doesn’t cease stretching before him. The cab driver turns on the long headlights and the uneven surface of the asphalt is revealed. The car slows down as they come onto holes and gashes in the road. Milijash sees the brake lights and pushes the brake pedal. Before him Isav is jigging on the back seat as the cab falls into one gaping hole Ozren avoids, having turned the wheel. The car he’s following goes into the final curve and slowly brakes. Milijash yields before the cab comes to a complete stop, somewhat further away from it. He sees Isav as he’s leaning toward the driver and paying his fare, hence getting out into the darkness, outside of the reach of the headlights, and proceeding further on foot. Ozren waits for Karabas to distance himself and come behind the gate into the tunnel. When the cab makes a U-turn, Milijash parks his black car and, now well lagging behind Isav, proceeds to follow him, looking at his dark figure as it breaks out of the tunnel onto the lit path of the fortress. Having come to the spot where Karabas till recently stood, Ozren takes out his notebook and writes down the time and an additional note, thus departing from the light of the lamppost so as to remain unnoticed, keeping to the direction in which Isav is headed. Karabas brakes onto the plateau of the fortress, onto a lit patch of land, hence Milijash’s decision to retard, keeping to the safety of darkness of the walls among which he stands and waits to see where his target is going. On the plateau of the Petrovaradin fortress is the Leopold I hotel. Ozren sees Isav entering the building so he exits the safety of darkness of the ramparts and heads straight in his wake. Famed among its visitors, the hotel has an aperitif bar, precisely there does Milijash find Karabas drinking his invigoratress, of course, as yet watching him from a distance, he has sat down at the opposite end of the bar and merged with the unnoticeable in this space in which every detail remains in the memory of the one who visits it for the first time. He sees Isav talking to the bartender who is pouring him another glass of brandy. He takes out his notebook and notes something down anew: a prolific professional, he is. The women are fancied up, and the men suited up as is only by night. It’s likely that he will stay a while in this local, thus he orders coffee from the waiter who temporarily obscures his view as yet striving toward the bar where Karabas is sitting. Permeated by the elemental spirit, Isav recognizes that to him thus far unrecognizable. He feels that all surrounding him already exists in him alone. The first ivigorateress warms his bowels, the second invigorateress profligates his senses so that the synthesis of Karabas and his surroundings can commence. Every county through which he’s passed and every town where he’s dwelled awakens in him, that’s to say, it now materializes with the necessity of memory and the ubiquitous present tense where he lasts not as unwanted and expelled, but as a man who has decided to leave. The sea of people in the aperitif bar of the Leopold I hotel is becoming something toward which he aspires. The voices last without speech; the faces he sees as if in passing, in an informal whimsy they remain in his eyes even when they’re not before them. That’s the world imagining it’s beautiful, and the people have imagined that they love each other. That’s Karabas’s heavy head liberating itself from the imperative of life and finding new housing for itself in the transient unknown for which he contends will pass eternally and in that sense become a constant in his life. The used word unknown shouldn’t be taken to mean the mystification of something outside of cognition and outside of the conception of Isav Karabas. What the word unknown represents are those frightful concepts and phenomena Isav utterly lacks in, such as: love and beauty; happiness and joy; a sense of belonging in his old age; finding a home for the elemental spirit as regards the circumstances pervading in the circle, and suchlike. He’s turned into an observer. Whether due to the invogorateress or thanks to the ebullient atmosphere in the local, his interest sphere suddenly widened, but one need understand that that sphere in a man such as Karabas doesn’t mean influence or necessary acquisition justified by the implications of progress, nor is it a frame of his personality which has suddenly become greedy and is thus longing for the good of acquisition, no, for Isav Karabas is a pensioner, and his interest sphere implies a cautious voyeurism toward people whom his elemental spirit is now attempting to simulate, more precisely, to decipher and overtake for Isav their mood and, what is even more important, the reason for such a mood. He stops at the second invigorateress. The bartender before him doesn’t change his appearance. The guests behind his back do not even try to compensate for the open roughness of their humanness. As rarely as ever, Isav feels happiness, but that happiness belongs not to him, that’s the laughter of others around him, and though no one utters a word to him, he once more feels he’s being chased away, once more he’s becoming an unwanted man belonging nowhere. A debtor to no one, Isav proceeds to think he’s utterly impawned. As if he’s hanging on a pawn shop wall while the potential customers watch him and ask the salesman to whom he belongs and from whence he came. Occasionally they take him down from the wall and inspect him up close so as to penetrate to his invisible qualities, but none are ready to pay the price designated for him by the salesman, thus they return him to the wall of the pawn shop among the others impawned, to hang in the dust while strangers size him up with their eyes which are, in the end, not even interested in him. Words convert into a ruction of voices not understandable to Karabas. He doesn’t like that, for it appears as if he’s drunk, and drunk he’s not, but is searching for his final place among people. By law it is prohibited to smoke inside as in all public places, but the smoke curtain says different. The grey cloud of carbon monoxide has risen above the guests’ heads reminiscent of pins in the tailor’s pads. Even if he wanted to, Isav would hardly be able to see their faces. Though the space is of enviable volume, enviable is, it seems, the number of smokers in it who in their nicotine orientation negate the necessity of any sort of a, bylaw designated, ban. As someone comes through the door, or exits the bar the smoke obfuscates like silt in the shallows, the plumes of misty greyness go wild, utterly disturbed by the gust of fresh air and the streaming caused by the opening of the door. The genteel company sparks Isav’s vanity, so Karabas decides to sit awhile longer at the bar where the bartender flaunts like a morning rooster. In the corner, far behind Isav, at a distance swathed in smoke and bodies of people, sipping his coffee, sits Ozren Milijash not in the slightest in the mood for sitting in such a place. He sees Karabas only when a rare body moves out of his purview. It’s true that he sees only his back and scruff, but knows well those segments of his anatomy as he’s always behind his back, following him like a loyal shadow. It’s so uncomfortable for him to sit in the aperitif bar that he gnashes through into his chin: -The decadent swine. Egomaniacs.- hence unhinges his jaws and sips his coffee. The leg crossed over the right knee begins to go numb. He’s slowly losing feeling in his left, lower extremity. For now he doesn’t notice it, he’s interested solely in Isav who’s as yet humped over the counter and is now being addressed by the bartender, laughing at something this one is saying to him. The numbness begins at the foot. First there paralyzes the heel, then the creeps advance as if in an ant swarm up the calf of the leg only to swoop down onto the knee. The leg proceeds to numb atop the knee where the thigh muscles benumb and become insensitive for dictates to motion. The general sense that his left leg is amputated engrosses Milijash, but he registers it only as a temporary nuisance and takes no action to obviate it and let his foot down on the floor, by the other. Isav rises from the bar stool, takes out his wallet and pays the bartender. Ozren realizes that he’s finished with invigoration only when Karabas passes not far from him, toward the local door. He quickly drinks up what remains of the coffee and lands the numb foot onto the ground. As the left foot touches the floor so through the entire leg there moves to flood the stream of blood and the extremity benumbs in motionlessnes solely patience can obviate. Milijash rises and rests on his left leg. He moves to step forth but only tumbles back into the chair, not having been able to keep on his feet. He proceeds to stomp his left leg against the ground so as to hasten the passing of numbness making for those ants creeping under his skin becoming all the larger and sentient. He sees Karabas getting out through the door, but is utterly helpless to follow him outside. He can go in Isav’s wake only with his gaze and that gaze is pleading and sad, quite inappropriate for his profession to which he’s resolved to give a good name. He rises once more, but the unpleasant sensation is still present in his left leg. Having no choice, he steps toward the exit, all limping and lurching like a lame chicken. As he steps with his left foot so the feeling that the entire floor is going into the same leg permeates him, he can feel in the left extremity the wood of the parquet, in fact, as if the entire leg became wooden. He manages to get outside. Not far in front of him he sees the departing Isav distancing and, in his view, surviving as ever smaller and smaller. He lurches off as fast as he can. If he only had a cane in hand it would make things easier, thuswise he’s left solely to his sense of balance, and it’s acute as if he’s balancing on a high wire. Yet, he goes in Karabas’s wake. He makes an effort to be all the quieter though he still doesn’t possess full control over his left leg still streaming with ever larger creeps and permeating his extremity from the toe of the foot to the hip. It would be a different matter if they were walking along a flat surface, that would be manageable, but they’re now on a declivity and Ozren barely keeps vertical, and the leg is as before numb. He wants to sit on the ground and bide till he again acquires government over his body, but the job waits not and there’s a great probability that, if he doesn’t clench his teeth and bear through the nuisance, all will fail. Surprisingly there isn’t a living sole in the fortress. As if the night has swallowed the walkers. The cobble path Karabas is walking along leads to the steps. They’re not many, but quite enough to cause fear in Milijash barely managing to bend his left leg in the knee, so he walks deftly like a log rolling downhill. At the bottom of the steps there’s an underground passage vaulted by chiselled rock and red brick. The thick walls of the underground tunnel radiate cold and glow with darkness. Barely anything is visible in the passage and Isav enters within, heading toward the light at the other end. The rock shines as if wet, in fact, that’s its surface accepting the reflection of the moon without. The gloom here isn’t pastel, it’s dead and lifeless. With his eyes, Milijash follows his target, standing at the bottom-most step, hence steps forth, badly limping. He doesn’t even reach the beginning of the underground passage, and Isav stops mid-tunnel. The gold ring containing the horseshoe is all alight in the dark, alight is the cobblestone under their feet. Ozren takes out the pistol from the holster standing by his ribs, thus tightening the silencer. Isav bodes no ill and proceeds searching his jacket pockets, having forgotten where he put his medicine. Milijash steps into the underground passage. The darkness swallows his figure and his shadow disappears under the rock vault of the tunnel amidst whose walls there survives only sound, the visible is not. Isav takes out the film tablets of potassium-chloride from his jacket inside pocket, but they fall to the ground. He’s beset by a new onslaught of powerful cramps in his legs and he falls to his knees. Ozren is one step behind him. He raises the hand in which the pistol flashes asunder: -As if you knew, comrade.- whispers the assassin. The barrel of the silencer sets amidst the locks of Karabas’s hair on his scruff and he squeezes the trigger. The shot voicelessly pierces the air and shoots through Isav’s head. The body carries in the final spasmodic tremble and falls face down onto the rock. Karabas kisses the ground with lips rigid. Milijash’s pale shadow passes over the lifeless body. The ring glows in the dark, a gust of wind plays with the hair stained with blood invisibly colouring the cobble. In the juncture of autolysis, the dissolution and fermentative decomposition of dead tissue, as yet not rotting; soon to be bloated due to the decomposition of tissue by bacteria in the stomach letting gas accumulated in the bowels, trapped due to the early collapse of the small intestine; with prospects of putrefaction and liquefaction of tissue, the disintegration of digestive organs, the brain and lungs, muscles abraded by bacteria; now outside of the scope of tilling in the struggle for the tractus profundus; in decomposition to any decomposition of the human body alike, lies Isav Karabas – dead. 2009.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 02:46:06 +0000
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