The first thing I notice is grey dust over everything, like a layer of ash after a volcanic eruption. Apart from the red streak stretching across the afternoon sky, we are driving into a black-and-white film set.
The driver confirms my feeling.
“Dust is the worst,” he says. “Breathing in the dust. We are waiting for rain. Then it will all turn into mud, of course. The rain brings dampness too.”
I notice he adjusts the mirror every time he addresses us, to have us both in view. He drives with his right hand, while his left hand lies motionless in his lap. When he is pointing at something, he takes his hand off the wheel altogether and the car swerves on the road.
I spot the fragment of an old town wall.
“Once there were ancient Roman ruins here, now it’s just ordinary ruins,” I hear him say. “It will take us fifty years to build up the country again. The refugees won’t come back while things are still a mess,” he continues. “And we don’t get tourists anymore. We are no longer on the news. We are forgotten. We no longer exist.”
He says the hotel was closed for many months and that it’s quite significant that he’s now driven three guests there in the same week. That’s in total, including us, he says, holding up three fingers and the car swerves.
We don’t pass a single undamaged building. The man points and provides commentary: the House of Parliament was destroyed, as were the museum and the TV station, which are in ruins, the National Archive and its manuscripts was also razed to the ground, and the Museum of Modern Art was blown up. “Here there used to be a school, there a library, there a university, here there was a bakery, here a cinema,” he continues.
Destruction lies everywhere.
High apartment blocks have been blown apart and there is an obvious shortage of glass in the windows of the walls that are still standing. I think to myself: You have your derelict, crumbling houses, we have our boulders that crack open with molten rock flowing through them like streams.
We slowly meander through the city, the few people about look pale and weary. In some places machinery is working in the ruins. There are widespread traces of the prosperity people enjoyed before the war. We stop at a crossroads, just beside a two-storey house with a missing facade, like a dollhouse. Although everything is covered in a thick layer of dust, I distinguish a patterned carpet on the floor and the remains of a piano. I’m transfixed by a deep armchair and footrest by a famous designer. Beside the armchair there is a lampstand and an overturned bookshelf. I notice the bed has been made in the room, someone has drawn a white blanket over the double bed just before abandoning the house, perhaps the person popped out to the bakery for some buns and got shot on the way. What draws my attention the most, though, is an unbroken yellow vase on a shelf in the living room. The wreck of a station wagon lies in the garage and a red tricycle stands in the driveway.
Garbage is scattered everywhere and, as far as I can make out, the sewage pipes have been unearthed. The driver apologises that it is impossible to roll up the window on my side. Apart from the pungent smell from outside and the strong odour of the driver’s Fahrenheit aftershave, I catch a faint, sweet flowery scent from the woman, totally different than Gudrún’s. What was the name of that perfume she wore again? Wasn’t she the companion of stars, with Pluto behind her ears? The woman silently stares at the road between the front seats.
“Developers,” says the driver, nodding towards some giant Caterpillar excavators. “After the air raids, the peacekeeping forces arrived,” he continues. “Then they and the contractors started showing up with their machinery.” He takes his hand off the wheel to adjust the mirror yet again. His eyes are now aimed at me.
He wants to know what I’m doing in this place.
“Vacation,” I say.
They both stare at me, the man and the woman. I notice them exchanging a glance in the mirror. The man says something I don’t understand to the woman, then they look at me again and nod. I observe them.
He rephrases his question and asks if I’m on a special mission, like the man he had driven to the hotel earlier in the week.
I repeat that I’m on vacation and they ask no more questions.
We move away from the city, driving up twisted country roads with woodlands on both sides. I notice that the tree trunks are grey, it’s as if a large part of the trees in the forest have been unable to leaf or flower.
On the outskirts of the forest there is a field where the driver slows down, lifting his hand from the wheel to point, causing the car to zigzag along the road.
“Graves, unmarked mass graves,” he says, including a famous national poet who wrote a poem about a desolate forest.
The woman says something and I sense the driver’s unease in his seat.
He shakes his head.
The woman addresses me for the first time.
“Here people have buried sons, husbands, and fathers,” says the woman. “In many places fathers lie with sons, side by side, even three generations of men from the same family.” She says that war broke out between houses, between neighbours whose children were in school together, between work colleagues, between members of the chess club, between strikers and goalies on the soccer team. “On one side there was the family doctor,” she rattles off impassively, “on the other the plumber and singing teacher. Former choir members turned into enemies, the baritone on one side, the bass and tenor on the other.”
She falls silent and gazes out the window.
I wonder what the cabbie did to survive. Why isn’t he buried on the outskirts of the woods? Was he an
