Phoenician Myths, Zeljko Prodanovic [the beginning after the end read novel .TXT] 📗

please… Does someone who sings deserve such scorn?’
‘Of course not,’ I assured him. ‘And who is scorning you?’
‘The ants,’ he replied, ‘those cockroaches and bedouins of the worst kind. The other day, when I was walking by their catacombs, I clearly heard them saying, ‘When that fiddler and harlequin comes, with his chanting, don’t open the doors to him. Who on earth needs that rubbish!’
‘And only a few days later,‘ the poet went on, ’while I was hovering over the fields beside Weimar, I came across a very exciting sight. A young ant was sitting under an oak tree and with sadness in his eye he watched the white road in front of him.
‘ ‘How is it going, youngster?’ I asked him, and he smiled sadly.
‘As soon as I began to walk,’ he said, ‘they loaded a grain of wheat on my back and said, ‘You will carry it till death!’ Then I laughed for the last time. And when that enchanter, the grasshopper, came along, they smashed his head with his own violin.
‘Therefore I have decided to leave these catacombs, get a violin and find the grasshopper.
‘Then we shall wander the world, the great enchanter and I. We shall admire the sunshine and young rainbows, fly over fields of ripe wheat and sing – so beautifully that the cypress trees beside the roads will dance like girls…’
‘You see,’ the poet went on, ‘if Nietzsche were here, he would certainly drop a tear. And I don‘t doubt that you, too, were moved with the yearning of the young ant. The yearning with which he wanted, in such an innocent and moving way, to connect two worlds that can never be connected.
‘Now, young man, do you understand me a little bit better? Can you for a moment believe that they lied to you? That Nietzsche did not go mad, but really went to Phoenicia. And that I am only his shadow.’
Von Aachen only sighed deeply and blinked his eyes.
‘Oh yes,’ the poet added, ‘I have not told you how Zarathustra died…
‘One morning he came out of his cave, caressed the lion, the cranes and the camel. Then he went up to the hill and kissed the young sun. ‘Oh heavenly eye,’ he said, ‘the blazing torch shining upon my face for the last time – good-bye!’ Then Ahriman’s angels came flying on white horses and cut off his head with a golden sabre.
‘They say that the lion, upon hearing the sad news, roared like a wounded lion and shook the universe. The cranes cried all the way to Baalbek, and the camel has not taken a sip of water, to this very day. Thus died Zarathustra. And do you know, young man – how god died?’
‘I am sorry,’ von Aachen said, ‘but I have to go…’
‘Oh, no, young man,’ the poet said, ‘I have to go. And you keep reading that exciting book. Good-bye,’ he said and out of his left moustache dropped a tear.
A few days later Friedrich Nietzsche died and the cranes, with his soul in their beaks, flew backwards to Baalbek.

Three Knights and a Girl

This is the story about two Phoenician poets and a painter who shared the same soul. All three lived the same number of years, thirty-seven, and their lives were interrupted in the same manner – they died by the bullet. The gentle Phoenician soul first sang in Pushkin, then cried in van Gogh and in the end burnt in Lorca.
In his novel Eugene Onegin, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin brought his hero into great temptation – at one point he had to go to a duel. Since the hero cannot die in the middle of the story, Onegin won.
Only a few years later, the great all-seeing eye played with Pushkin in the same manner – he had to go to a duel as well. As it usually happens, the cause was banal, and his adversary was an officer of the French army whose name I cannot recall.
‘The die is cast!’ Pushkin said. ‘Like my friend Onegin, I‘m also going to duel. And the crazy gendarme is threatening me. He says that he may not be good at writing verses, but he certainly knows how to shoot. But this does not disturb me. I‘m not doing this because I am quick on the trigger, but because I want to show that he, who is so beautifully playing with life, can even more beautifully play with death. After all, life is nothing but a postponement of death.
‘If I kill that gendarme, fine – there will be one fool less under the sun, and I will have the memory of the moment when I encountered death. And if I lose – there will be one secret less in the universe, and that’s all.’
The next morning, in the street of Ivan the Terrible in St. Petersburg, the poet and the gendarme stood one against another. As one could have expected, the gendarme was quicker.
While the poet lay on the street, mortally wounded, a girl with purple hair came along and caressed his face. Although he was more dead than alive, the poet smiled and whispered, ‘What happened, my little Gypsy girl?’
‘Nothing, Alexander Sergeevich,’ the girl replied. ‘We will have one secret less in the universe, that’s all…’ She dropped a tear, then turned into a white bird and flew away.

&

Vincent van Gogh spent his life in a labyrinth. He roamed the dark chambers of Elagabalus’ garden trying to find the exit, and when he realized one day that he would never find it, he simply shot himself. And so he tore his own heart, the labyrinth and the endless universe to pieces. This is how it happened…
That day, van Gogh was sitting on the magic hill in Provence, wanting to express the endless sadness and solitude of the universe with colours. He painted naked, dead girls lying beside a river, and above them were flying winged tombs. In the distance, the dark walls of a labyrinth could be seen.
As I said, van Gogh sat under an old olive tree, painting, when a girl came from somewhere, wearing a beautiful purple dress.
‘You are painting, Vincent…’ she said.
‘Yes,’ the painter replied. ‘I‘m painting my house without doors and windows, my dead mistresses and my winged brothers.’
‘And you are waiting for Theseus.’
‘Yes, Ariadne,’ the painter said, ‘I am waiting for Theseus to come out of the tale and open the doors of the labyrinth with his golden sword.’
‘But what if Theseus does not come?’ the girl asked.
‘Well, if he does not come,’ the painter said and smiled, ‘you will then marry the satyr from Phoenicia and live like a Gypsy queen, and I will, like Elagabalus, spend 666 years in a labyrinth, and then drown in my own solitude.’
The girl looked at him with a sad smile in her eye, then pulled a gun out of her bosom and quietly, as if she was picking a flower, shot him right in his heart. He died on the spot and the girl dropped a tear. Then she turned into a white crane and flew away.

&

Federico Garcia Lorca roamed the slopes of Andalusia, illuminated by the sunshine and the scent of the Guadalquivir, on whose banks the Gypsies raised forges, in which they forged the golden suns and silver moons. He roamed and sang, and thus arrived at that fated day.
The mild Andalusian sun was sinking into the Guadalquivir and our Lorca sat under an old cypress tree, with a tear in his eye. Then the Gypsies came from somewhere and asked him what misfortune had befallen him. He told them that his own soul had deserted him.
‘I do not know why,’ he said, ‘but she simply went out of me and flew away.’
‘Oh!’ the Gypsies exclaimed. ‘And what then, poet?’
‘I went all over Andalusia,’ the poet replied, ‘searched through Granada, Cordoba and Cadiz, I chased her with greyhounds and a falcon on my shoulder, but there was no trace of her. And what shall I do without her, compadres?’
While they were talking, on the other end, right on the spot where the sun had sunk into the Guadalquivir, a girl came out of the river and went to them. In one hand she had the moon, in the other a tambourine. When she approached them, the girl smiled and began to rattle with the tambourine. ‘Only for Lorca and the company under the cypress tree,’ she said and began to dance.
‘What a beauty!’ one of the Gypsies whispered without taking his eyes off her and the poet recalled the verses from his poem: ‘The beauty is walking along the road, playing the tambourine. Run away, my little beauty, the green wind is chasing you…’
When she finished dancing, the girl came to the poet and handed him the moon and the tambourine. ‘Good-bye Lorca,’ she said and kissed him, and a tear dropped out of her eye. Then she turned into a purple bird and flew away.
The end of the story, although it may appear absurd, is only the logical solution of this dramatic scene. One of the Gypsies, probably frightened by what he had seen, said something like this, ‘Maybe I don’t know anything about life, poet, but about death I certainly do. This is death!’ he said and killed the poet on the spot. He only killed the body, though, because the soul, as we saw, was already on her way to Baalbek.

Epilogue

The Wandering Rhapsode

Thus, in the dusk of that sunny day, I finished Phoenician Myths. I sat for a while in front of the temple of god’s tear, then took the parchment and went down to Baalbek. I wanted to find my friend Baalzebub, the famous satyr from Phoenicia, and give him the manuscript.
As was usual for that time of day, the town was swarming with people.
At the square in front of Baal’s statue sat Homer of Lydia, narrating in his bronze voice the famous story of Hector, tamer of horses. Beside him sat Calliope, playing the lyre.
A bit farther away, Leonardo was doing a portrait of the beautiful Nefertiti, and in the shade of a palm tree Salvador Dali was painting the queen of Sheba, flying over the desert on a winged Bactrian camel. Under the young cedar Orpheus was singing a melancholy song, and on one of the pillars of Jupiter’s temple sat Khayyam from Shiraz, smoking a hookah.
In the atrium of Baalbek’s library, Dante and Balzac were discussing the purpose of literature, and Lucian of Syria was writing Last Psalm, the miraculous book that would –