The Tale of Petkutin and Kalina

Kyr Avram Brankovich's elder son, Grgur Brankovich, thrust his slipper into the stirrup early and drew his saber steeled with camel dung. His frilled and blood-stained vestments had been sent from Gyula, where Grgur lived with his mother, to Constantinople to be washed and ironed under his father's supervision, to dry in the perfumed breeze from the Bosporus, the bleach in the Greek sun, and to return to Gyula with the first caravan.

Avram Brankovich's second, younger son was at the time stretched out somewhere in Bachka behind a motley stove built like a church, and he was suffering. It was rumored that the devil had pissed on him and that the child would get up at night, flee from the house, and clean the streets. For at night Mora sucked him, she nibbled at his heels, and man's milk flowed from his breasts. In vain did they drive a fork into the door and with their spit-covered thumb between their fingers make the sign on the cross over his chest. Finally, a woman advised him to pass the night with a knife soaked in vinegar and, when Mora fell upon him, to promise to lend her salt in the morning and then to stab her with the knife. The boy did so: when Mora began to nurse at his breast, he offered her a loan of salt, stabbed her, and heard a cry in which he recognized a voice had known long ago. The third morning, his mother arrived from Gyula, in Bachka, asked for salt at the door, and dropped dead. On her was discovered a knife wound; when he liked it, it was sour. . . . From that moment, the boy was left weak with horror, his hair began to fall out (according to what the healers told Brankovich) he lost one year of his life with every hair that fell out. They sent Brankovich locks of the child's hair, wrapped in jute. He attached them to a soft mirror painted with the child's image, and so knew how many years his son had left to live.

However, almost no one knows that Kyr Avram, besides those two sons, also had a foster son, if that is the right word for him. This third, foster son had no mother. Brankovich created him out of mud and read to him the Fortieth Psalm to awaken and breathe life into him. When he came to the lines "I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined to me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings," the church bell in Dalj rang out three times, and the young man moved and said:

"At the first ring I was in India, at the second in Leipzig, and with the third I entered my own body." Then Brankovich tied a Solomon's knot in the boy's hair, hooked a hawthorn-wood spoon into his pigtail, bestowed the name Petukin on him, and released him into the world. Around his own neck he placed a rope with a rock, and stood through the liturgy for the forth week of the holy Lenten fast with this collar around his neck.

Of course, the father also had to build death into Petkutin's breast (so as to have everything just like the living). At first, this embryo of his end, this small and still-unfledged death inside Petukin, was timid and rather stupid: it had little need for food and had stunted limbs. But it was already infinitely pleased that Petukin was growing, and he grew enough that soon his ornate sleeves were so large that a bird could fly in them. Yet death within Petukin soon became quicker and smarter than he was, and was the first to sense the dangers. Then it seemed to acquire a rival, who will be discussed later. It became impatient and jealous and drew attention to itself by making Petkutin's knee itch. He would scratch the knee and his nail would inscribe letters on his skin, which could then be read. This is how they corresponded. Death was especially intolerant of Petkutin's illnesses. But Petkutin's father had had to provide him will illnesses so that he would look more like a living being, because illness serves as a pair of eyes for living beings. Brankovich tried, however, to make Petkutin's illnesses as innocent as possible, and favored him with a flower-fever, which appears in the spring when the wild grass grows and the flowers dust the wind with water and pollen.

Brankovich installed Petkutin on his estate in Dalj, in a house where the rooms were always full of gray-hounds that were keener on killing than on eating. Once a month the servant combed the carpets with cards and pulled out balls of long different-colored hairs resembling dog's tails. As time passed, the rooms in which Petkutin lived took on the same special colors, by which Petkutin's quarters could be recognized immediately from a thousand others. The imprints and grease spots that he hand his sweat left behind on glass doorknobs, pillows, sets, and supports, on pipes, knives, and glass stems, created a rainbow of hues particular to him alone. It was a kind of portrait, icon, or signature. Brankovich sometimes found Petkutin inside the mirrors of the spacious house, built into the green silence. He taught him to reconcile inwardly autumn, winter, spring, and summer with the water, earth, fire, and wind which man also carried in his bowels. The enormous work to be done lasted ages; Petkutin acquired calluses on his thoughts, his mnemonic muscles were stretched taut, and Brankovich taught him to read one page of a book with his left eye and one with his right, to write Serbian with his right hand and Turkish with his left. Then he instructed him in literature, and Petkutin began to succeed in finding traces of the Bible in Pythagora's writings and signed his name as quickly as catching a fly.

Overall, he became a handsome and educated young man, and only occasionally did he exhibit barely noticeable signs that he was unlike others. For example, on Monday evenings he would take a different day from his future and use it the following morning, in place of Tuesday. When he came to the day he had taken, he would use the skipped Tuesday in its place, thereby adjusting the total. Under these conditions, of course, the connecting seams of these days could not fit together properly, and cracks appeared in time, but this matter only gladdened Petkutin.

This was not so with his father. Brankovich was forever doubtful about the perfection of his creation, and when Petkutin reached the age of twenty-one, the father decided to test him and se how he competed in every regard against real human beings. He thought: "The living have tested him; now he must be tested by the dead. For only if the dead are deceived and, upon seeing Petkutin, think that a real man of flesh and blood is standing before them, one who first salts then chews, then can the experiment be called a success." And, having come to this conclusion, he found Petkutin a bride.

Since landowners in Walachia always take with them a bodyguard and a soulguard, Brankovich occasionally did the same. Among his soulguards he had a Tzintzar who used to say that everything on earth had become truth and who had a very pretty daughter. The daughter had taken all of her best features from her mother, who after birth remained forever ugly. When the girl turned ten, her mother, with what had once been pretty hands, taught her how to make bread, and her father summoned her, told her that the future is not water, and died. The girl wept such torrents for her father that ants were able to climb up to her face on her tears. She was left an orphan now, and Brankovich arranged for her to meet Petkutin. Her name was Kalina. Her shadow carried the scent of cinnamon, and Petkutin discovered that she would fall in love with any man who ate cornelian cherries in March. He waited for March, ate his fill of cherries, and invited Kalina for a walk along the Danube. When they parted, she removed the ring from her finger and threw it into the river.

If something good happens to somebody--she explained to Petkutin--it should always be spiced with some small unpleasantness, so that the moment is better remembered. One always remembers the unpleasant longer than the pleasant things in life.

In short, she liked Petkutin, Petkutin liked her, and the wedding took place that same autumn the great rejoicing. The groomsmen at the wedding said their good-byes and kissed farewell, since they would not be seeing one another for months; then they threw their arms around one another and left to make the rounds of the brandy stills. When spring came, they finally sobered up, took stock of their surroundings, and, following the long winter stupor, laid eyes and recognized one another again. Then they returned to Dalj and saw off the newlyweds on the traditional spring excursion, shooting their guns in the air. One should know that on their spring excursions, newlyweds from Dalj usually go as far as the ancient ruin, with its lovely seats of stone and its Greek darkness that is thicker than any other darkness, just as a Greek fire burns brighter than any other fire. This is where Petkutin and Kalina now headed. From afar, Petkutin looked as if he were driving a team of black horses, but when he sneezed from the scent of a flower or cracked his whip, a cloud of black flies would rise from the horses and one could see that they were white. This, however, bothered neither Petkutin nor Kalina.

That winter they had fallen in love. They ate by turns from the same fork, and she drank wine from his mouth. He caressed her until her soul groaned within her body, and she worshiped him and begged him to urinate inside her. She would laughingly tell the others girls the nothing scratches better than the three-day beard of a man who has been making love. But she thought to herself; 'The moments of my life are dying like flies gulped down by fish. How can I make them nourishment for his hunger?' She begged him to bite off her ear and eat it, and she never closed drawers or cupboards behind her, so as not to break her luck. She was a quiet girl, because she had grown up in the silence of her father's endless reading of one and the same prayer, which always drew the same kind of silence around it. And now it was the same as they set off on their excursion, and this pleased her. Petkutin held the reins of the coach around his neck and read a book, while Kalina chattered. They played a game along the way. If she spoke a word that he happened to be reading just then in his book, they would switch roles and she would do the reading and he the guessing. Thus, when she pointed to a sheep in the field and he said that he had just reached a place in his book where a sheep was mentioned, she scarcely believed him, and took the text to see for herself. And indeed, in the book was written:

And when I had with prayers and supplications
Entreated them, the nations of the dead,
I took the sheep and cut their throats above
The pit, and the black blood ran out. And then
There gathered out of Erebus the ghosts
Of the departed dead; unwedded youths
And brides, and old men that had suffered much.

Having guessed correctly, Kalina began to read what followed:

And many wounded by the bronze-tipped spears,
Men slain in fight with bloody harness on them.
From every side they swarmed around the pit
With eerie cries, and pale fear seized on me.
For me, I drew my sharp sword from my side
And sat there, suffering not the strengthless shadows
O' the dead to venture near the blood, until
I had made my question of Teiresias.

Just as she had come to the word "shadow", Petkutin noticed a shadow cast by the ruin of a Roman theatre by the road. They had arrived.

They entered by the actor's entrance, placed the bottle of wine, mushrooms, and blood sausages they had brought with them on a large rock in the center of the stage, and quickly retired into the shade. Petkutin gathered dry buffalo droppings and some mud-caked twigs, carried all this to the stage, and lit a fire. The sound of its crackling carried clearly all the way to the farthest seat in the last row at the top of the theatre. But outside the arena, where wild grasses mixed with the scent of cranberries and laurel, nothing of what was taking place inside could be heard. Petkutin salted the fire to get rid of the smell of dung and mud, then washed the mushrooms in wine and tossed them and the blood sausages onto the smoldering cinders. Kalina sat and watched the setting sun change seats in the theatre, moving towards the exit.

Petkutin walked about the stage and, noticing the names of bygone occupants of the seats carved in front of each row, began to read out the ancient unfamiliar names: 'Caius Veronius Aet . . . Sextus Clodius Cai filius, Pubilia tribu . . . Sorto Servilio . . . Veturia Aeia . . .'

"Don't summon the dead!" Kalina warned him. "Don't summon them--they'll come!"

As soon as the sun had departed from the theatre she removed the mushrooms and blood sausages from the fire and they began to eat. The acoustics were perfection itself, and each bite they took carried singly and with equal clarity to every seat, from the first to the eighth row, but everywhere in a different way, echoing the sound back to them at center stage. It was if the spectators whose names had been carved into the fronts of the stone seats were eating together with the couple, or were at least greedily smacking their lips with every bite. One hundred and twenty pairs of dead ears were eavesdropping at pricked attention, and the entire theatre was chewing along with the married couple, hungrily sniffing the aroma of the blood sausages. When they stopped eating, the dead stopped too, as if a morsel had got stuck in their throat, and they waited tensely to see what the young man and woman would do next. At such moments, Petkutin was especially careful not to cut his finger while slicing the food, because he had the feeling that the smell of human blood might throw the spectators off balance and quick as that, as quick as a shooting star, they might attack him and Kalina from the gallery and tear them apart, driven by their two-thousand-year-old thirst. He felt himself shudder, drew Kalina toward him, and kissed her. She kissed him, and they could hear the sound of 120 mouths kissing, as though those in the gallery were kissing too.

After the meal, Petkutin threw the remainder of the blood sausages in to the fire to burn and then doused the flames with wine; the sizzling of the dying fire in the theatre was accompanied by a muffled "Psssss!" He was just about to return the knife to its case when the wind blew unexpectedly, depositing pollen on the stage. Petkutin sneezed and cut his hand. Blood spilled onto the warm stone and began to smell. . . .

At that moment120 shrieking and howling dead souls descended on them. Petkutin drew his sword, but they pulled Kalina apart, tearing her live flesh piece by piece until her cries became one with those emitted by the dead, and until she herself joined in devouring the still un-eaten parts of her own body.

Petkutin did not know how many days had passed before he realized where the theatre's exit was. He wandered about the stage around the dead fire and the remains of dinner until something invisible picked up his mantle from the ground and threw it over his shoulders. The empty cape came up to him and addressed him in Kalina's voice.

Frightened, he embraced her, but beneath the fur and the depths of her voice he could see nothing but the purple lining of the mantle.

"Tell me," Petkutin said to Kalina, clasping her in his arms, "I feel as if some terrible thing happened to me here a thousand years ago. Someone was torn apart and devoured, and his blood still lies on the ground. I don't know if or when it really happened. Whom did they eat? You or me?"

"Nothing happened to you; they didn't tear you apart," replied Kalina. "And it happened just a while ago, not a thousand years ago."

"But I do not see you. Which of the two of us is dead?"

"You do not see me, young man, because the living cannot see the dead. You can only hear my voice. AS for me, I do not know who you are and cannot know until I have tasted a drop of your blood. But calm down--I do see you, I see you very well. And I know that you are alive."

"But Kalina!" he cried. "It's me, you Petkutin, Don't you recognize me? Just a moment ago, if it was a moment ago, you kissed me."

"What is the difference between a moment ago and a thousand years ago when things are the way they are now?"

At those words Petkutin withdrew the knife, raised his finger to the spot there he imagined the invisible lips of his wife to be, and cut himself.

The drop of blood released its smell but did not spill onto the stone, for Kalina eagerly awaited it on her lips. Once the recognized Petkutin, she screamed and tore him apart like carrion, greedily drank his blood, and tossed his bones into the theatre, whence came the others like a swarm.

On the same day that this happened to Petkutin, Kyr Avram Brankovich wrote the following words: 'The experiment with Petkutin has ended successfully. He performed his role so well that he fooled both the living and the dead. Now I can proceed to the more difficult part of my task. From the small to the large undertaking. From man to Adam.'