Steps Through the Mist - Serbian author Zoran Živković’s 80-page “mosaic novel” features a different woman in each of its five tales, beginning with a student at a boarding school and concluding with a disturbing event impacting the life of an elderly woman. And that’s “mosaic novel” in the sense the stories share common themes, in this specific instance, themes of freedom versus determinism, clarity of perception versus the mist of mystery. Also, by my reading, these five pieces share a prime focus for author Zoran Živković: the intersecting of two realities, the reality of the story with the reality of the storyteller. To observe these themes in action, let’s turn to each tale:
1. Disorder in the Head
We are in the classroom at a girl’s boarding school and watch as twenty-six freshman obediently stand at attention when their teacher, Miss Emily, enters. All the girls are wearing identical navy-blue dresses covering their youthful bodies from the neck to well below their knees and have their hair pulled back in braids. Only when Miss Emily walks over and finally sits down at her desk are the girls permitted to, in turn, take their seats.
As an effective method to contain and eventually snuff out any trace of a new student’s disorderliness, Miss Emily asked the girls to write down their dreams from the previous night. From many years of experience, Miss Emily knows a number of her sixteen-year-old freshman will write about made-up dreams as an attempt to outsmart or deceive her, maybe even try to make fun of her. They must be given a lesson in public humiliation for their own good.
True to form, today there are three such girls, Alexandra, Theodora and Clara. As she has always done, Miss Emily has the three girls stand and castigates them one by one for lying. Miss Emily then asks what they have to say for themselves. An uneasy silence pervades the room. Miss Emily takes satisfaction in the girls' upset and tears. And then the unexpected happens: a barely audible voice, “They didn’t lie.”
What! Such insolence! Miss Emily asks the name of the girl who dared speak. “Miss Irena,” she answers. Miss Emily recalls something and pulls out from her stack of papers a blank sheet from the bottom. Miss Emily holds up the sheet that’s blank other than the student’s name at the bottom. “Ah, you are the one. Very nice. And this was your dream?” Irena replies, “Yes.”
A lively exchange ensues wherein Irena informs Miss Emily the paper is blank because she dreamed of mist and out of the mist she entered other people’s dreams, including the dreams of Alexandra, Theodora and Clara. Therefore, Irena continues, she knows all three of her classmates reported their actual, true dreams.
Taken aback momentarily, Miss Emily collects herself and accuses Irena of lying and colluding with those other three lairs. Again, the unexpected: Irena informs Miss Emily she has also entered her dream and goes on to recount Miss Emily's dream in detail. Flabbergasted but still maintaining her wits, Miss Emily orders Irena to the principal's office.
When Irena reaches the door, we are in for another instance of the unexpected, this time propelling the story into further realms of the fabulous - Irena cautions Miss Emily and her classmates that when she leaves, everyone in the classroom will vanish in a cloud of mist.
Miss Emily responds: "We had no idea that someone so important was with us." To which Irena answers: "I'm not at all important. Quite the contrary. I am very secondary. This is not my dream. I am only a gust in it, as usual. But when I leave it, the dream will cease to be. All of this will disappear."
Let's pause here and make a shift to Zoran Živković's theme of the interplay of author and story. When Irena admits she's not at all important, only secondary, only a guest in the dream, doesn't this sound as if she recognizes herself as a character within a story, that her entire world is a fictional dream created by an author?
And how about the classroom vanishing into mist? Isn't that an accurate image of what happens when a writer finishes a story? In other words, the characters are vitally alive in the imagination of an author during the actual writing process but when the last sentence is completed and the writer moves on to other things, the characters and everything else in the story fade into mist.
Likewise, readers bring characters to life while reading but what fate awaits those characters once the story is over and one closes the book? If you are like me, the characters dissolve into mist and remain as mist until they are retrieved by memory.
2. Hole in the Wall
We join Dr. Alexander as she enters a padded cell where, following a suicide attempt, twenty-six-year-old Katarina sits in a straitjacket leaning against the back wall. As is her usual practice, Dr. Alexander also takes a seat as encouragement for a patient to feel more relaxed and open up. Fortunately, Katarina has no problem talking about her suicide attempt, in her own mind, an attempt that was a logical consequence of her head injury in an auto accident.
Logical consequence? Oh, yes, as Katerina explains, following her accident, she cannot only see into the future but she can also choose which one of the possible futures will manifest both for herself and for everyone else – hardly a gift; more of an unendurable burden. Dr. Alexander knows from experience she must proceed with caution as she engages Katerina in a discussion touching on freedom, chance and determinism. You will have to read for yourself to see how this provocative tale plays out, but let’s again switch to the theme of author and story.
At one point Katerina speak of her vision of the future: “It starts to shine with an internal glow, turning transparent and expanding at the same time, pushing the others into the background. In the end it fills up the beam’s whole space. That’s all there is, that one future that will become real. It stand before you crystal clear. Everything can be seen in that one strand that has detached itself and expanded. Everything that will happen.”
Ha! Irony of ironies. This sounds precisely the way many fiction writers proceed with their stories, especially if those writers are like Zoran Živković who told an interviewer, “When I come to my desk to begin a new story or a new novel, I know very little about it, at least on a conscious level. It is in my subconscious that the work is already fully formed, waiting to be transferred to my monitor via my keyboard.”
3. Geese in the Mist
Our attractive thirty-something narrator is having one of those days – the hot water in her ski resort hotel bathroom was turned off, a kid squirted her with ketchup at breakfast, and then, when she was nearly all bundled up in her ski wear, she tore a nail.
Can things get any worse? Unfortunately, they can – turns out, the person sitting next to her on the two-seater ski lift isn’t another skier but some sixty-year-old gent wearing a dress hat, bow tie and fancy shoes. And then, halfway up the slope, the energy cuts out. Ahh!
As if reading her thoughts, Mister Formality tells her the energy will be restored in exactly seven and a half minutes. Oh, you must be clairvoyant. He tells her he is not at all clairvoyant. She presses him on his seeming omniscience and the gentleman begins to explain the dynamics of life in terms of the metaphysics of cause and effect. Oh, no! It most definitely is one of those days.
More than you can guess, madam. Reading between the lines, I sense this formally attired, dapper gentleman might just be author Zoran Živković inserting himself into his story so he can converse with his main character. Certainly, the most humorous tale in Steps Through the Mist.
4. Line on the Palm
A seasoned clairvoyant's current client is not the usual middle-aged man or woman looking to her for a guarantee of living to a ripe old age but a young man who turns out to be a philosopher in possession of a few unpleasant surprises - not the least of which is a loaded pistol. The tension between freedom and determinism is about to take a serious turn.
5. Alarm Clock on the Night Table
Elderly Miss Margarita pops awake and knows for certain something is terribly wrong. Can an alarm clock's malfunction have alarming (no pun intended) results? Yes it can. A tale with too much mystery for me to say anything further.
When asked by an interviewer to name authors who have had an influence on his writing, as part of his reply, Zoran Živković stated he has great respect for the allusive webbing of Kazuo Ishiguro’s prose. I’m happy to report there is a measure of Ishiguro-style allusive webbing in Steps Through the Mist, adding a special piquancy. I encourage you to take the needed steps to read this short novel for yourself.
Steps Through the Mist is available as a stand-alone novel and also 1 of 5 short novels in Impossible Stories 1 published by Cadmus Press
Serbian author Zoran Živković, born 1948
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