Once upon a
time, not long ago, in the mountainous Balkans, lived a boy. His name was
Benjamin Zec, and some would say he was just an ordinary boy.
There was no tree around his little town that Benjamin had not climbed,
like Tarzan. He was the best marble shooter on his street and an excellent
second in the school's kilometer dash. The other boys in class respected him,
as he was the best goal scorer on the soccer field, and the girls kept their
eyes on him giggling because Benjamin did not hesitate to pinch bottoms or
stick out his hand, as if yawning, to grab a barely formed breast. Perhaps this
is why he often wore proud bruises under his big green eyes.
Benjamin, the little devil, used to return from recess, cradling a
T-shirt full of early cherries to his chest. Then he would eat them during
class and throw pits at the teacher's pets sitting up front. Benjamin loved the
smell of the woods and the earthy primrose buds more than any science lesson.
Once, he even challenged the physics teacher with the insulting and bold
statement that Newton had, in fact, been defecating under that famous tree and
that no apple had fallen on his head, but that he, Newton, was inspired by
seeing his poop succumb to the force of gravity! Benjamin said that the legend
about the apple tree was a blatant fabrication anyway: apples don't just fall
off trees like that. Besides, he added, the best ideas always come from
relieving oneself in nature! The whole class laughed, and Benjamin, of course,
got a D in physics.
Yet, the covers and the smell of books always fascinated him. He would
spend hours lying in tall grass or hiding in the tree canopy. Classrooms were
suffocating walls—but in the countryside, surrounded by the thick shade of
spruce and pine, he was free to turn into a hero of every adventure he read.
His favorite book was "The Picture of Dorian Gray." The story was
about a young man who sold his soul to remain forever young. He had rented a
paperback edition from the library and did not intend to return it.
Yes, indeed,
some would say that Benjamin Zec was just an ordinary boy. But then he decided
to become a ladybug.
One time, you see, as he fell off the branch of a cherry tree, he lay
spread out, one freckled cheek on the wet ground. His eyes were caught by the
frosted grass through which a ladybug was slowly pacing. A ladybug is
marvelous, he thought; it's never in a hurry, scrambling nonchalantly from one
blade of grass to another as if surprised that its tiny weight is still
sufficient to bend the tip of a blade of grass. Strange, he thought, how
ladybugs seem to make their decisions at the spur of the moment and suddenly
spread out their wings from under their black-spotted armor and fly off who
knows where, taking your good luck with them.
He opened the palm of his hand, and the ladybug jumped onto his lifeline.
Benjamin Zec had always wanted to become an actor, to star in action movies
or play a significant role on that famous American Broadway... whatever that
meant... But now, it seemed to him that becoming a ladybug would suffice. To be
able to turn into one of these insects, like this one here, which was so
delightfully walking over his palm—to grow wings and disappear, well, that
would be something... Ladybug,
ladybug, show me the way, he whispered the children's wish song. A
bang burst through the back of his head at that very moment. The cosmos buzzed
in his ears, pouring a cold silence down his forehead.
And Benjamin Zec was gone.
Only a dull thud was left behind, brash and piercing, bouncing off the
trees in the forest. The sound wandered through the neighboring villages and
then was reduced to a faint echo, only noticed by birds, until it got lost
forever.
That hot summer day was the last anyone heard from the boy. Some kids
from the neighborhood alleged that Benjamin had grown wings and that he did
turn into a ladybug, for real, and had flown away. Others, however, kept faith
in the prospect of his eventual return, believing that he would come back one
day and organize nothing less than the most spectacular soccer tournament
imaginable.
Maybe Benjamin just got a little lost, wandering the surface of our
little planet, and when he realized he had escaped his guards, he just seized
the opportunity and ran like hell. People had bigger problems to worry about,
so no one troubled themselves about Benjamin Zec for long. He couldn't play
along. No great loss, that one.
Years have passed, but did anyone still care about the mystery of
Benjamin Zec? Perhaps only his swaybacked mother, who still watched the canopy
of wild chestnut trees and dug up primroses with her bare hands. Time was
dripping into the gutters of oblivion. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick... Drop by
drop, Benjamin's mother drank rainwater from the gutters and sadly chewed
cherries every July.
The curious case of Benjamin Zec eventually became folklore—a fairy tale.
And even though most people had forgotten the real boy behind the story, there
were those to whom the question did occur now and again. They would conjure up
their memories of him, if only for a moment or two—a freckled boy with green
eyes who used to pinch the girls and holler like Tarzan while climbing trees—and
so he became the ghost of the town, a myth recounted around shifting
candlelight, a legend that was flying around on the black spots of ladybugs, a
fathomless public secret that no line of inquiry could penetrate, a surreal
remnant of a forgotten past. The only evidence of the boy's existence was a
black and white photograph: he, Benjamin Zec, in pants torn at the knees and a
threadbare sweatshirt, squinting at the sun from underneath an unkempt head of
hair, with marbles in his hand. His mother kept that photo close to her heart,
wandering the wide world to pull this memento out of her brassiere from time to
time and shove into the face of oblivion a disheveled Benjamin Zec.
People prayed to
him for a good harvest and begged for forgiveness when a drought hit their
fields as if worshiping some ancient pagan deity. When they told their children
the story, they always began like so: Once
upon a time, there was a boy...
Some said that they recognized Benjamin Zec in America; he hadn’t become
a fairy tale but a religious fanatic, had let his beard grow and had married a
woman with dark and mysterious eyes. Others said, no, he was in a loony bin
now! Another theory was that he had joined the US Marines in penance and was
working as a landmine clearer in Iraq! Everybody knew something, but no one
knew anything. Still, there was one grain of truth to the whole story: Benjamin
Zec did end up in America. But, to complicate matters, Benjamin had
no idea how or when he had ended up there! He didn’t remember a thing. All he
knew was this: he’d appeared one day, on a stage, in a theater, in the middle
of a Shakespeare play, wondering:
“To be or not to be?”
And he was...
He was on stage, on Broadway, and the audience was on its feet. They
applauded Mr. Benjamin Zec for so long that he thought he would die of old age
standing there, adored by his audience.
“Bravo! Bravooo!” the amazed masses shouted, throwing flowers at him.
No one knew that Benjamin didn’t know how he had come to be there, and he
didn’t even know who or what he had been before his arrival. But he was ready
as ever, simply accepting his role.
While enthusiastic crowds continued to cheer his name, Benjamin ushered
toward a dressing room. On the way, he signed three autographs and
absentmindedly nodded at a pushy pitch for a movie role as a Serbian war
criminal. How did they learn his name, he wondered. Benjamin said nothing but
glided through the crowd. There, in the wardrobe mirror, he stared at his
freckled face. He stripped himself of Hamlet and rediscovered Benjamin Zec. He
wondered how old this familiar yet unknown figure could be. Not more than
twenty-five, he thought, pleased. Twenty-five! Oh, Benjamin Zec was
delighted with the body he had found himself in possession of.
Proud of his manly facial features, strong chin, and piercing green
eyes—whoever he was, he certainly deserved this new life of his. No question
about that. It felt good to be grown-up and successful. He decided to go along
with this adventure, to ignore the past he didn’t remember anyway, to be
whomever he had to be, for the situation was already whatever it was.
After the show, a limo driver called him out familiarly, and Benjamin
understood that this was his chauffeur. He treated Benjamin like an old friend,
politely inquiring whether the opening was as successful as the year before. He
drove Benjamin to a beautiful house, majestic with its Greek pillars and Gothic
arches, facing the Atlantic Ocean.
Inside, the servants had already kindled a fire in the fireplace. They
referred to him as “Mister Benjamin”. He replied in perfect English, though
something told him that it wasn’t his first language. He could feel his tongue
twisting and straining and words tumbling around in his mouth in a strange
accent.
Benjamin decided to go through his house, looking through his stuff and
hopefully finding clues about his past life. It was out of the question for him
to ask his servants where he had come from and how long he had lived here! He
didn’t want them to think he had lost his mind somewhere between slipping into
and out of Mr. Hamlet’s skin. Benjamin felt they must have known him well, as
they treated him with respect and a subtle touch of intimacy.
The house was his; of course, he knew where everything was, but he didn’t
have conscious memory of any of these familiar objects. Any emotional
understanding of the things around him was distant and unfathomable. Even his
portraits and photo albums were of no help: all of them showed a recent
Benjamin, in the here and now, with the same dark hair, the exact spots around
the eyes, and the matchless youth of his face. It seemed that he had never been
younger than he was now. As if he had been born just like this, a
twenty-five-year-old, and now was meeting himself for the first time. But how
was it possible that he didn’t remember anything? How was it possible that
there was nothing from his past of which he could grab hold? How did it come to
be that he was playing Hamlet on Broadway just like that? Did he have any
friends or family? A father? Mother? Where was he born? When was his birthday?
Benjamin knew nothing. It was as though someone had just made him up, whole
cloth.
He looked at the photographs on the walls. The pictures were
unflattering, he thought—they showed an arrogant man struggling to smile. Cold
eyes followed his every move. And why did he have so many photographs hung
around the house anyway? And they all seemed as if he took them yesterday. Even
his painted portraits appeared completed just the day before as if the oils had
managed to dry overnight.
Was he trying to tell himself something?
Well, yes, he realized almost immediately:
I do not age!
Oh, how confused Mr. Benjamin Zec was just then... He had the face of
eternal youth, like that Dorian Gray fellow! And that was another thing. The
same way he had known Hamlet by heart, every line of this Dorian Gray
had somehow been etched into his gestures, racing into his
consciousness—equally inexplicable.
And that was nothing compared to the next miracle.
Remembering Dorian Gray, Benjamin ran into the bedroom. The room was
upstairs, the first on the left, and in the night-table drawer was a book—he
knew it. So he opened the drawer. The book he found had a cracked, fragile
cover and yellowing pages. And it wasn’t in English. But Benjamin knew how to
read it, and the cover said:
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Benjamin quickly opened the first page and began to read uncontrollably.
He understood every word; they rushed rapidly through him, first
ingratiatingly, warm, pleasant, and familiar, but then painfully, as though
this strange language was piercing deeply into his soul. Benjamin felt like
something was sawing his lungs in half, as though his ribs were closing in on
his innards. He was going to faint. Pictures of his well-mannered smiles spun
around him, and his pupils rolled under his fluttering eyelids. A deafening
bang forced its way into the back of his head and hit his forehead.
Benjamin lost his balance and fell to the ground.
Bright light soon swallowed the darkness, and he found himself on stage.
“To be or not to be?” The audience applauded, and he bowed. He saw his
face in the dressing room mirror. He wondered who he was and why he was there.
His limo driver knocked on the door, identified himself as Benjamin’s chauffeur,
and asked if he was ready to go home. Benjamin had a beautiful house with Greek
pillars and Gothic arches. His portraits and photos hang from the walls.
Benjamin looked at himself in the mirror and realized he wasn’t aging. Just
like Dorian Gray! In the bedroom, he found a book by Oscar Wilde, opened it to
the first page, and fainted.
He again found himself under the glaring spotlight when he opened his
eyes. Again, To be or not to be! Oblivious
to the nature of his predicament. Another standing ovation. He became
reacquainted with his face in the dressing room. The figure in the mirror was
somewhat familiar. His chauffeur drove him home to a splendid house overlooking
the Atlantic Ocean. Benjamin looked at his reflection and realized that he
didn’t age, just like the main character in the book. The Picture of
Dorian Gray! He ran to his bedroom. Panting, he opened his night-table drawer
and found a book by Oscar Wilde. He opened to the first page and was quickly
comatose.
When he recovered again, he saw the spotlight, the stage; he spoke
Shakespeare’s famous words, the crowd was shouting his name, and it all
happened as it did the first time, and the second, and who knows how many other
times... It always started with him waking up on the stage and ended when he
opened the first page of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Then,
unconsciousness, and then from the beginning again and again.
Benjamin Zec felt like he was skipping transience, trapped in one point
of the moment while staring helplessly at the vicious cycle of time. And he
would have stayed there, in this parallel world, forever, if there hadn’t
finally been one slight variation in his routine—hurrying upstairs, he
stumbled, and something fell out of his pocket: a marble.
Next time, when Benjamin Zec ran through his usual loop and dashed
upstairs to seek out Dorian Gray, he slipped on that marble and fell. And
time skipped ahead of time, just like a stuck record player would skip the
chorus and jump right into the third verse! Benjamin fell into his usual
oblivion, but the light that welcomed him when he awoke this time wasn’t from a
spotlight but a summer sun. He saw a vast green meadow and a single cherry tree
in it. The fruit of the tree had a dark red color of blood, and its sweet flesh
hung heavily with juice. Cherries that have no worms are no good, Benjamin
thought. The tree was bursting with life, and its fragile branches swayed
easily in the wind. Hints of cherry scent played across Benjamin's lips, and he
licked them to carry off even the slightest trace of sugary stimulus.
Some people were digging close by a lone tree.
Benjamin wanted to pick some cherries. He extended his hand, but just at
that moment, his fingers plucked a fruit from its branch, and the ground
beneath his bare feet went as dry and loose as the interior of an hourglass. He
fell. The soil pulled him down, devouring him in a single bite. He tried to
hold on to the cherry tree, but, to his shock, he dragged it into the
abyss. The terror of being buried alive shut his eyes fast.
When his consciousness got hold of a bit of light, Benjamin found himself
on a pile of bones and grinning skulls, disfigured and broken: skeletons
hugging each other in a heap. Benjamin held firmly to the cherry tree, which
was now just a root attached to a tiny skeleton in the fetal position, like an
umbilical cord. The shrunken bones were the bones of a boy. The skeleton's
skull had a hole in the back and an even bigger one in the front, and between
its teeth was gripped the seed from which the roots of the wild cherry tree
sprang.
And then, only then, did Benjamin Zec realize it was his skull!
His teeth...
His bones...
His life...
His death...
His restless soul wandered around like a gypsy song.
Benjamin looked around and found that he wasn't alone. Many other souls
were down there, looking for their bones. He recognized some of the kids from
school... There were also people from the neighboring village... And his
physics teacher... And Benjamin's father too! And one of the neighbors... And
then another... And many, many others... Many that he didn't even know...
Quietly, obediently, they searched through this shrine abyss filled with
skeletons.
The dead came for their bones while the living above them exhumed a mass
grave. Skeletons were placed sideways and with numbers. Benjamin Zec was number
25. His tagged bones were reconstructed by speechless people, gently, like the
bones of a rare dinosaur. Soon, they were laid on the white sheet on the
ground, showing a pale construction of a little Benjamin Zec.
There he was: a little boy again.
He was eating cherries and reading The
picture of Dorian Gray when one of the soldiers violently yanked him down
off the lowest branch of the cherry tree. As he fell to the ground, he felt a
marble slipping out of his pocket; it got lost in the deep grass. The smell of
grass wafted around him, and the soil was still wet. It calmed him down. He
didn't want to think about his fear; he ignored the moment's agony. He watched
the carefree ladybug whose tiny feet crossed his lifeline.
As the Kalashnikov barrel rested at the back of boy’s head, he thought of
Dorian Gray and his never-ending youth. He wanted to be an actor on Broadway,
to have a personal driver and a house with great Greek pillars, Gothic arches,
and a view of the ocean. Or if he could at least... if he could at least
transform into this beautiful insect... and fly away... Ladybug, ladybug, show me the way, he
hummed.
At that moment, the ladybug spread its transparent wings and flew out of
his open palm to fulfill the wish of Benjamin Zec.
"Best European Fiction 2014". Published by Dalkey Archive Press.
All rights reserved by Elvis Hadzic
