BOUQUET

Then Tantalus took the grapes and drank the water

in the world where everything is forgiven.

one

He is getting ready to leave, looking around for all the little things you cannot leave the apartment without. He repeats like a mantra keys, phone, money and turns the TV off. Once again, he realizes that the overly loud TV voice was the thing that unsettled him and made him anxious. He felt like he had to compete the entire morning in his apartment, adjusting to that voice and doing his stuff parallel to it, instead of having simply turned it off. People sometimes forget that they have power over the objects surrounding them.

Having checked whether he had turned everything off, he sets off for his father’s place where they are supposed to have lunch. It was both a routine and at the same time anything but. They both liked to eat fine food, to prepare a rump steak, sauté or tripe for one another, to prove who is better at preparing steak tartar, who is more in touch with popular sauces and culinary combinations, can tell the difference between radicchio and endives, and who is actually the impeccable keeper of the atavistic hunting ancestors’ habits, yet still knows perfectly well how many minutes are needed to cook a cutlet just right to correspond to the needs of a European body and just raw enough to exhilarate a barbaric palate.

He arrives too early. His father greets him wearing a striped apron and a wide, uncontrollable smile because today at the shop they asked him how old he was – that old, and he looks – like that. But what can he do when, as he says, compared to him most people look so… well, civilian somehow. His father suggests that he should make himself at home and leaf through the wine magazine that he buys every month, and goes back to the stove to put the steaks on the pre-heated burner. He does as he was told and plunges into the world of those who combine business and pleasure. Business or pleasure? – Both. He was always amazed that he had not become an enologist, but somebody later explained that they do not go around getting drunk, they have to preserve their senses and drink less than he assumed they did. With that thought he finished his perusal of the magazine and got up to set the table.

Having got everything in order, they sit at the table and reach for the olive spread with the aperitif. Having failed to develop a love for cognac, he pretends that he appreciates the expensive drink his father pours with unhidden pleasure into a small and very narrow glass. It is barely noon, and he already has to pay his dues to style! They toast and launch into a conversation about everything and nothing, mainly the father’s recent visit to Bratislava. They conclude that almost all Central European towns look alike and a tourist actually enjoys the thought that he understands the urbanist plan beforehand, and makes educated guesses about which style dominates which quarter and why. They agree that at some point in one of the streets they could both easily be duped by a third person and persuaded that they are in fact in a completely different town. The father soon steers the conversation to hunting, his favourite subject, and shows him a calendar he has recently acquired and hung on a narrow section of wall next to the stove. January – doe, February – partridge, March – wild boar. He brusquely voices his disapproval because he had always thought that there is nothing sporting about blowing a deer’s head off, but he does not dare continue with the criticism because he can feel how much pleasure his father derives from hunting. He finally concludes that the calendar is, if nothing, beautiful because it is dominated by green and brown tones.

The meat is on the table. Neither likes to spoil it with potatoes or pasta, so the two steaks lie waiting lonely on big white plates. He makes the first cut and feels the characteristic secretion of saliva on both sides of the tongue when he sees the dribble of red meat juice leaving the steak upon carving and staining the white plate. He enjoys the first bite enormously. And realizes that despite his rich culinary experience, his father has always handled meat better and maybe his objection to hunting was detrimental to it. He often thought how obviously inconsistent he was in that respect. How can one object to hunting, yet enjoy its consequence so much? Is meat tastier when you obtain it yourself? He had no answers to those questions, but he knew he could not give it up.

He noticed he was often inconsistent, but deep down it did not present any impediments to his day-to-day living, the only activity we never plan and which, though we perform it without cease, always remains somewhat incomplete. So he decided not to think about it too much, but do what he wanted at a given moment. Because somewhere deep down he knew that consistency was other people’s trait. He knew them, consistent people, but he suspected that none of them was capable of feeling pleasure, at least not the way he himself experienced it. Because he believed that it just occurred, that a person has to remain more or less passive before it, surprised, transfixed or flooded by the feeling. Consistency, he thought, means the ability to control and filtrate events, and pleasure itself, if it occurs at all, is then planned and expected and surely must lose some of its strength. And that is the last thing he wanted.

Father’s comment that the meat is not good enough, broke his train of though. He did not understand why and it seemed to him that at a certain age a negation of every, even the tiniest, thing, becomes the basic modus operandi. The way fathers take revenge against the world around them. Because the world has started to offer itself to others like a wanton debauchee they knew how to satisfy very well back in the day, but who now keeps slipping though their fingers in her ardent desire to give herself to new men, with less experience and more strength. After all, too much experience is the first sign of numbness and gateway to denouncing everything that continues to exist without us, which will successfully fool those who still do not know much, but eschew those who know too much to keep quiet.

When they have eaten the last morsel, the father pours wine, first to the son then to himself. He states that it is not worth it to waste time in an attempt to choose it in one of the local convenience stores. It is not much of a choice, in his opinion, because it will always end in a bad purchase. It is important to know good wine shops, and he does, he even got a set of wine glasses as a gift from one of them. It cannot be bad when a good man buys good wine from good people, father claims. He then strives to explain the difference between red and white wine glasses, stressing that the secret of the former is in the closing and the latter in the opening. And neither is better or worse for it. The only important thing is to know when to take which. You are to blame if you put it in the wrong context. Then its mission fails, the father says, and it becomes either imperceptible or dominant. He moves on to the story of which meals go with which wines, and which must under no circumstances be paired with this or that wine. The son listens and shares his impressions of the wine they just tasted. And they did taste it with great care, graciously and clumsily at the same time, each in an unconscious attempt to eclipse the other. They raise their glasses simultaneously, gently swirl the wine with a soft movement of the wrist to see whether and what kind of tinge it leaves on the glass wall, and then bring the glasses close to their face to smell the content. They lock eyes and clink cheers, take a sip they keep in their mouths for a second or two before they let it slide down their throats. He generally tries to deduce what his father has served this time and often guesses what kind of wine it is. Personally, he prefers tart, dry wines that make his mouth pucker at the moment of drinking. At that moment his mind conjures up an image of lips suddenly becoming lined by vertical grooves, a thousand little lines, one next to the other making the lips look like a thousand years old artefact rather than moist, soft tissue on a young man’s face. And he cannot control what happens to them, the feeling that wine is drawing his lips to a pucker against his will or power. It fascinates him, which is what, among other things, he considers a pleasure.

For the umpteenth time they mention bouquet, the perfectly round word that in the son’s mind encapsulates all the layers a wine locks in itself. An array or aromas waiting to become an impression in the taster’s mouth. He always wondered whether the impression was unique, but at the end he concluded that it could not be, that it had to vary to a higher or lesser degree from person to person, but that there is a central quality that no one can miss or ignore. Young wines do not have a built-up bouquet, the father claimed with authority, and the older they get, it becomes more pronounced and lingers in the memory.

They finish the wine and light up a cigar each. They start a conversation about music and the father gets up to bring videos of concerts he believes essential to watch, among them the video of a Scandinavian jazz guitarist he recently discovered. He is amazed, describing how fast and skillful his hands are, while his face is expressionless, square and dumb. As usual, he berates him for not playing as often as he used to, which the son is well aware is unacceptable, but feels that he cannot be bothered much about it. For a while he played the guitar pretty intensively, and then he had just had enough. He is almost certain that the creative phase will come back, but he cannot force it. It is always that way with people and phases, it seems.

Then they listen to jazz for a bit, drink wine, exchange views on everything happening around and in them. The TV is on but muted, awash with images from the Chasse et peche^[1] channel. His father does not speak French, but that is not an obstacle to his watching the hunting and fishing shows with rapt attention. The shots, much like the calendar, were dominated by greens and browns. Picture is sometimes more important than sound, or meaning for that matter.

After his father moved onto the intimate details of life in the old Hollywood, he realised that it was time to leave if he was to complete all the things he had left for tomorrow as a sweet guilty pleasure. He was not sure where father got all the information from, but that was not particularly important. Whether Liz Taylor wore Monty Clift’s tooth around her neck for luck after the accident in which it was knocked out by the strength of the crash, was not really crucial information. But the fact that he still cared about trivia curiously made him happy; maybe because a deep and honest lack of interest in pointless facts is sometimes a sign that a person has had enough. In every sense of the word.

Having noted that the two of them are if nothing else two excellent glass holders, always impatiently waiting to tell the other something, he hugs his father, claps his shoulder and promises to come again. He says that next time, he intends to cook. His father smiles contentedly and walks him to the door.

He always loved watching his tall silhouette as he walks away and he watches him until he turns the corner to where the staircase starts. As usual, the collar of his coat is slightly twisted which the father noticed just before he disappears from view. This causes a slight tightening of the corners of his mouth before he decides to turn around and close the door. As he turns the key in the lock, he thinks that it is not fair that a person cannot see the back of his head. But, contented by what the eye can see, he pours himself some more wine.

two

He is in Prague. Although it seems like there is a pattern for how to tour the town, it is easy to get lost. The alleys are too narrow and full or people, and when you look up you get the impression that the buildings taper toward the top and bow to one another. After an hour of walking he feels fatigue setting in, though mostly in his head, not his feet.

He has trouble getting his bearings and though he has no final destination, he can feel that he is wandering aimlessly, as if he is constantly in the same street. He stops and looks at the funny little fraying and barely readable map (he is the kind of fellow who has the irresistible need to ascertain his coordinates even in cities that are not new to him) again, and when he sees where he is, he leisurely continues to walk. He passes a girl but is late to realise how beautiful she is, otherwise he would have watched her longer. But what can he do, he is near-sighted and not particularly bold so he has to content himself with the two seconds she was before, then in line with him, and just as quickly behind him, and the third position came too soon and lasted the longest, ad infinitum, without end or possibility to repeat the preceding ones in the same or any other way.

After the exhibition he was invited to as part of the business trip, he goes to a bar and orders Moravian Muscat^[2]. It would help the rest of the evening pass smoothly, simultaneously leading him toward sobriety and giving him the opportunity to fell the buzz for a bit longer. It was 9:30. He had two glasses alone at the bar, took his coat and went for a walk. He felt the need to protect himself against communicating with anybody that evening, and something that pressured him almost unpleasantly, appearing as a secondary thought in his head as he walked toward one of the bridges. He was mildly horny, but in a strange, yearning way. He imagined how good it would be to make love with somebody at that moment, slowly, furtively, with a myriad of long looks and postponement of the end. He looked discreetly at all the girls that passed by him or sat on the steps leading to the docks, talking to each other. It seemed laughable and almost impossible to make contact with anyone there, outside, in the street… If anyone ever met anyone like that and talked to them for more than a minute, that is more a myth that a real-life story, it seemed to him. He went into another bar, very near the water and evidently anything but popular judging from its sparsely populated spaciousness. Two couples were playing pool, and there were benches surrounding two wide rectangular tables. The wood of the benches was starting to flake. The whole place exuded an irresistible aura of a classroom of some kind, only with fewer lights and more bottles behind the bar where the professor pulled pints for the colleagues sitting and softly exchanging a word here and there from time to time.

The table he sat at was empty, and the neighbouring one had several people who seemed to be somewhat younger than him. He ordered white wine without asking about the label. It is just inappropriate to do so in some places. He knew the bartender would look at him like he was an idiot, which was maybe one more proof that snobbism is always at play, even if it is the inverted kind of snobbism from the other side of the mirror. He borrowed the newspaper from the bar, and when he remembered he did not speak a word of Czech, except maybe letiště and autobus, he decided that at least looking at pictures and turning pages would be something to do and give him the alibi to sit there, alone, occupying the large table for a while longer.

He was soon joined by two girls at the other end of the table who looked at him from time to time, and whom he looked at too, from time to time. He took an inordinately long time to finish his drink, beset by this ever-present and somewhat laughable thought that something might happen if he spent more time somewhere giving the situation the opportunity to spontaneously evolve in some direction. When they were done with their drinks, the girls put on their jackets and moved on. He almost felt bad he had not drunk his drink faster and done the same before them instead of staying here now, alone and at loose ends. It seemed to him that in his case one thing never led to another, only exclusively back to itself, appearing always the same and repeating in much the same manner, in a circle, round and round and round…

---

Leaving the bar, he remembers that he has not had any dinner. He felt that the air was, though chilly, soft. That is how he imagines October, simply perfect. He decides to walk to Vltava without any particular desire to go sightseeing; he sets it aside for another time. He is choking down donuts he managed to find, with some effort, near the river. He was terribly hungry, but like always he felt like a hypocrite because he knew well of the four horsemen of the apocalypse and that only people not right in the head can eat flour, sugar and cream (sweet and sour). This, of course, includes any kind of fast-food, most cakes and the rivers of ketchup the feeble-minded insist on pouring over their food. Eliminating food as such, eradicating its taste and authenticity, that is what it means to cover it in that awful concoction, and it is perfectly clear that ketchup and food are mutually exclusive – either there is food, or there is ketchup. Ketchup generation, his father hissed. Let’s cram everything under one and the same flavour. Basically, he agreed with that sentiment, but that did not prevent him from frequently resorting to takeaways or a bag of the notorious condiment when he was alone in the apartment with only it and a slice of bread. Yes, there are some who would rather starve to death than eat something like that, but he did not belong to their sophisticated, self-disciplined group.

He loved to boast about his gastronomic experience, but he was also ready to swallow a well-seasoned woollen cap if he was in a hurry or too lazy to go down to the store at a given moment. And there he was, outstandingly inconsistent citizen of two worlds; he looks at the water and chews on his donut wishing it had a bit more vanilla filling.

The water was calm tonight. And he knew that water as such is very inconsistent. It adapts itself to the wind, the channels it flows through and all the glasses and carafes of the world whose shape it assumes when poured in. And so they look at one another, the water and him. Full of mutual understanding.

As he stands on the bridge, looking around, it occurs to him that he always had this unwarranted belief that he was safest in the exact moment he was in. There was no room for uncertainty, all he had to do was absorb whatever came along.

He thought that the most difficult thing is to imagine your own life in the future and whether it would bring any big changes, as it normally does not for most, or if the temporary solutions would in time become permanent, as it happens for more than most. He was not entirely sure if he would be ready for any answers, even if they openly offered themselves to him. Still, that evening in Prague it occurred to him that he would like it if he could look around himself and notice some results, some tangible evidence of his time on earth… Maybe to craft a stool? Or a child? A book? To be honest, none of it sounded bad.

He leaves for the hotel. He tries to evoke memories of the minibar and whether there was anything left in it, as he slowly returns from his forward-looking thoughts of the future to the present time and hears the cacophony of the street living around him with undiminished intensity.

It is lovely to walk and absorb, he thought.

It would probably be just as lovely to actually make that stool at some point, later a child, and then maybe even write something, and if it happens, sit on the stool, put the child onto his lap and read to it until it, as an unintentional but the harshest critic, inadvertently starts to yawn.

three

Some of the people living on Mount Kosmaj say Here comes Peter, when they see a car pulling up in front of his cabin. When they ask him don’t they complain at work because, they hear, out there people would work on Jesus’ second coming (although it’s not all bad news from the outside world, for example they have heard that His body is finally gluten-free), the forty-year-old from Boston who visits for a month every summer tells them that he can work from there if push comes to shove. However, this time he came only with his son because his wife did not manage to come to an agreement with her oppressors, he explains as he pulls a variety of differently-sized suitcases from the capacious trunk.

His next-door neighbours and closest friends there on Kosmaj are old Pavle and his wife Marija. Pavle is an old man with smart and happy eyes, who used to work in the cable manufacturing plant, but moved permanently to Kosmaj some twenty years ago and started to make his own wine there. His wife Marija never spoke much about her education but in conversation it was easy to surmise that she could not have finished more than elementary school. She had not been able to get pregnant for years, except once when her son, whom she had already named Petar, emerged stillborn. She said that with it, all the joy drained from her, like resin from a tree; although it was not noticeable because despite her ample size and fiery nature, eyebrows wider and longer than in most women, she hid a crazy spark of eternal perseverance, goodness and wonderful beauty. She used to say that a woman controls everything in life, except for the blood that drips down her legs and a child adamant not to be born.

Pavle used to say that nothing ever changes, that nothing has changed in the country since 1945 to date. They do it all for the pictures, cutting ribbons, painting a tunnel in black on the side of a rock, round up a bunch of extras, a train comes, approaches the tunnel, and the shot instantly pans over the crowd waving its flags and everything is as it should be; except there is no railway. He had realised long ago that production was dead. No wonder you hightailed it, Peter, though I do not like to see you go. Some money is flipped, moves from hand to hand, but there is no real production. No one supports it. Let’s do a poll in Belgrade, Peter, to see how many people will say that they know technologies, handle materials? Zilch. I did not know what I can do, but I knew what I wanted when I came here. The only thing left that I wanted to try was grapes. Do you know how long it takes to produce you first real wine? Six years, Peter, six years. Sure, you have a harvest earlier, after two, maybe three years you can have something tangible, but I am talking real, proper wine. You can have some grapes for general consumption earlier, but we both know that real profit comes from wine, the proper kind, the one you wait for. If you can’t wait, Peter, you can’t make wine.

Pavle’s wine cellar is small and you cannot say it generates any big profit annually. He is famous for his red wine, coupage of Prokupac and Vranac. On the first day they meet again after a longer interlude, Pavle always takes him to his cellar. The same way he tried wine with his father, he approaches the unusual wine tinged with the old man’s clearly discernible long wait.

Today, there were two carafes waiting for him on the table. His six-year-old son is running up and down, the whole house echoing with his euphoric steps. He takes an hour to unpack the essentials and set the kitchen to rights, even though he notices that Marija has already cleaned everything and got the cabin ready for their arrival. There is a hefty chunk of meat waiting for them in the fridge. He cuts it into smaller pieces and puts it on the stove because they are already pretty hungry. Having finished his mad dash around the house, his son rushes in and continues to run around his legs asking for the umpteenth time why he keeps wine in a vase, and he tells him that it is a decanter and it will make the wine taste better. Decarter his son repeats the word a couple of times under his breath and continues with the interrupted dash, first around the table, bouncing a little rubber ball, and then up and down again, between the upper and ground floor, several times, possessed by the natural childish intention, similar to an animal’s, to get to know the area and, in a way, mark the territory.

Soon, the two of them take their lunch. Apple and tree. One got a bit more, one a bit less meat, one had wine, the other water with a couple of drops of wine. Bevanda, the boy grins, draining the glass, thirsty from all the running in and around the cabin. Then he chews the meat in his small mouth still missing some permanent teeth, his eyes darting around the kitchen, everything on the table, floor and ceiling, incapable of calming down with all the strength and curiosity bubbling in him.

Looking at him, he remembers his father and it all looks like the days the two of them spent together doing the same, only then – like his son now, his father possessed an energy completely different from his, and he stops to wonder if maybe he is the connecting tissue keeping his father and his son together, fusing them in their similarity – he, as the person altogether different than the two of them. The thought suddenly springs up as a bizarre theory of a generational sandwich, and he is beginning to believe that it was true – the order in which people come into the world is such that, though the progeny might not be too similar to its parents, it in turn produces humans more similar to the grandparents than to themselves. It seemed fair if nothing else, as it resulted in a steady number of different people in the world.

It seems fair.

He peers into his glass very happy with the colour of the wine he is drinking. Then it struck him that a wine does not know when it would be opened or with what meal it would be drunk, but it waits patiently; maturing in the meantime because it is the best it can do. Wine does not know about the future, but is says plenty about the past. Still, the present is the best time for wine, because it likes to make the lips of the drinker pucker, against their will or power. If wine really could feel things in this way, it would surely, among other things, consider it a pleasure.

He continues to chew his morsel of food thinking that each of us has his own bouquet of a kind, and the older we are the more prominent and memorable it is. Suddenly everything was logical and acceptable and not so scary any more. Even the fact that one day we will be transported in a barrel or a receptacle somewhat more rectangular in shape – chacun a son gout^[3].

[1] Hunting and Fishing, French TV channel.

[2] Muscat mostly cultivated in the south-east of the Czech Republic.

[3] French, “there’s no accounting for tastes” (literally “to each his own taste”).

Translated by: Mirjana Slavkovski