The Decameron Project

by The New York Times

  “Johan was taken back to the long border-control hallway. The agent informed him he would remain there until the next day. If the consulate agreed to help him, he could gain entry. If not, they would force him onto a flight home.

  “It was late, and the hall was empty, the kiosks locked and dark. The other travelers had all gone on to unseen realities that Johan, trapped alone in this bleak interstice, envied. He sat in a chair. He was thirsty and had no water. He had no cigarettes. He was cold and had no jacket. He was trying to ‘lie down’ in the chair, his neck resting on the hard edge of the seat back, wondering if he could sleep this way, when he heard a loud bang.

  “At the other end of the hall was a young woman. She’d dropped a large red suitcase on the floor. Johan watched as she opened it and riffled through. She located cigarettes and lit one. Kneeling on the floor with the lit cigarette in her mouth, she proceeded to reorganize her suitcase, her busy movements those of someone free of worry, killing time. Periodically, she got up and paced around.

  “How did she have such energy? Johan had to focus his energy on his outrage at being detained.

  “She waved at him. He waved back. She walked down to his end of the hall and offered him a cigarette.

  “Up close, he saw that she was way beyond his league: in other words, exactly his type, this confident girl in tight jeans and white high-top Converses. Later, he held on to details. The jeans. The high-tops.

  “ ‘Why do they keep you?’ she asked in stilted English.

  “ ‘They don’t like my passport,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

  “She smiled and said, ‘I guess you could say they don’t like my passport either.’

  “He asked where she was from. Her answer, the way she said the word, became another detail he held tight. ‘Yugoslavia.’

  “Johan understood it was possible she had no passport for them to like or dislike, just as there was no Yugoslavia. Not anymore.

  “She was trying to go to Abu Dhabi, she said. Johan nodded, unable to remember if that was the Emirates or Qatar or where. He saw oil sheikhs and girls like this one. He wanted to ask questions, but all he could think of was Who are you, which you never ask, and no one can answer.

  “She went back to her end of the hall. He smoked the cigarette as if inhaling the mystery of this brazen, sexy girl. He was pondering going down to speak with her when border agents came into the hall and approached her. There was a discussion that Johan could not hear, the girl nodding, not saying much. She was escorted out, dragging her big red suitcase.

  “Johan slept badly, upright, in the uncomfortable chair. When he woke, it was dawn. Rain fell over the tarmac beyond the windows in cruel sheets.”

  * * *

  “Johan’s dealing with the consulate, and the period in which he bummed around Prague, is not of interest to our story. He was there for a while and then home. He continued to think of that night at passport control, of the girl and her brave and casual boredom. He graded himself an F in enduring a taste of repressive Soviet-style authority. An F for failing to learn more about the girl when he had his chance.

  “Back in Oslo, Johan was hired in the first wave of the dot-com industry, sold his stake in a ‘start-up’—whatever that is—and made good money. He could afford to travel and avoid working for a while. He decided to go to Abu Dhabi, to try to find the girl.

  “He’d read about women from poor and war-ravaged countries who immigrated there by arrangement with bad people who forced the women into prostitution. Johan felt certain the girl he met had come deliberately, knowingly, to hustle in an oil-rich nation. She grew larger in his mind.

  “He spent two weeks searching, night after night, in the various hooker establishments of Abu Dhabi, neobrutalist hotels with loud, smoky mezzanines, as he scanned the faces of women who scanned him as a mark. He watched women exit elevators and click through hotel lobbies, or stand around in lounges, preening and alert. His conversations usually ended in misunderstanding; the women all thought he was looking for a type, not a specific actual person. Or they played games, tossed false leads. Sure, I know her. Blond, yes? She’ll be here later. Or, I’ll arrange a party and you can see her. Or, You’ll forget all about her, trust me.

  “Only once did the offer seem worth pursuing. A dark-haired woman with large eyes and a crooked nose spoke to Johan in a frank way that he read as believable. I know this girl you mean. She’s Croatian. Me, I’m Croatian. She came here around then, yes. I think she told me about that, some trouble when she arrived. Yes, she’s still here.

  “That night, he went to the small, dingy club where the girl with the crooked nose said to meet. She was there with another girl who was tall and blond. Her hair wasn’t long, as he recalled, but short and bleached almost white. He told her his story, that he’d seen a girl—maybe her—in the airport trying to enter Prague three years earlier.

  “ ‘I don’t remember you,’ she said. ‘But I think that was me.’

  “ ‘Did you have a giant red suitcase?’ he asked.

  “ ‘Yes, I did.’

  “It was her, and of course she would not remember him. She was not going to be weighted by sentimental memories of a dweeb like Johan. He remembered her, and that was enough.

  “For the next week, Johan saw her every night, and every night, he paid for her company. He had planned to demonstrate his interest, his sincerity, by insisting they merely talk, get to know each other, despite the money he was spending. But that was not how things went. She seemed to prefer the exchange of services that she was used to, and Johan went along with it, perhaps too easily. This caused him guilt and confusion. But after several days together in this stilted arrangement, something shifted. She turned to him, you could say. I still don’t understand it. It’s baffling, but she fell in love with Johan.”

  There was a pause in the story while the Norwegian and his wife spoke in their language. The wife’s tone was corrective.

  “She wants me to here acknowledge,” she translated for him, speaking of herself in the third person, “that no one understands why anyone falls in love. And that my surprise that she did fall in love, instead of use him, probably derives from a cheap stereotype that post-bloc Slavic women are cynical and calculating. My wife is right. I should not be surprised the girl had a heart, and that she could find something to love in Johan, even if I don’t. I’m a lot like him, as I said, and we are, in truth, adversaries to a degree. But let us continue.

  “This girl moved to Oslo with Johan. The first few months, for him anyhow—we can’t speak for her—were blissful. The person he’d fantasized about for three long years was funny and charming. His friends all liked her. She adapted easily, and even took it upon herself to learn Norwegian.

  “But as they settled into life together, doubt crept in for Johan. If he went out alone, she’d ask where he’d been. Occasionally, when they passed other women on the street, part of him peeled off, dreamed of strangers. One morning she turned to him in bed and her breath, morning rank, singed his nostrils like a moral failing. All he could do was hold his own breath.

  “He started to become annoyed when she didn’t know a particular band, a movie. Since he’d spent his early 20s slacking and absorbing culture while she was fleeing a failed state, he was impatient with her ignorance of what mattered to him.

  “She began to want sex with Johan more than he wanted it with her. That it was always available to him devalued it to a degree he’d never imagined possible. It was like walking through a room constantly filled with steaming piles of food and you really just want a break from food. He wanted a break from her.

  “He suggested she visit her mother, who lived in Zagreb. It was while she was away that he began to suspect she was not, perhaps had never been, the heroic creature in the airport with the white high-tops. They don’t like my passport either. He was riven by nostalgia for that girl. Because this one, it wasn’t her. Even if it was her it wasn’t her. What he’d seen, wanted, extolled, was
not the girl he’d found. She wasn’t heroic. She was normal, needy, imperfect. The relationship, as far as he was concerned, was over.

  “Johan was too cowardly to tell her in person. When she returned from her mother’s, he’d left her a note. He said he’d be gone a few days while she sorted out what to do and where to go. Johan took a train to Sweden. He sat in an ugly hotel bar with brash Swedes and drank flat, tasteless beer and felt depression spreading through his body. It was wintertime and bleak. The girl he’d dreamed of was nowhere to be found. This plunged him into existential crisis. He stared out the window at the heavy sky and bare trees, which had tattered plastic bags caught in their branches.”

  * * *

  The Norwegian sighed audibly and looked around the table, as if for a reaction. His wife was also quiet.

  We were all confused. This was it?

  “But, but but,” the Charlemagne biographer said, “what about a happy ending? That was the rule.”

  “It is a happy ending,” the Norwegian said in his language, and his wife repeated in ours.

  “Of sad Johan drinking flat beer in a tacky bar, loveless and alone?”

  “The story is happy for me,” the Norwegian said, “not for Johan.”

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “Because I married the woman he was looking for. And she is telling you this story now.”

  We all looked at his wife.

  “My husband has had his fun,” she said, and mussed his hair, but lovingly. “And tomorrow I will have mine, as it will be my turn.”

  And with that, we said good night.

  ong ago, back when everyone had gone, we lived in a tower called the Morningside at the same time as this woman named Bezi Duras—she seemed old to me then, but as I’m now approaching what was probably her age myself, I’m beginning to think she wasn’t.

  The people for whom the tower was built had all left the city, and the new apartments sat empty until someone at the top figured having a few units occupied might give the looters pause. My late father had served the city with some loyalty and brains, so my mother and I were allowed to move in at a greatly reduced price. When we walked home from the bakery at night, the Morningside loomed before us with just a few thin, lighted windows skittering up the black edifice like notes of a secret song.

  My mother and I lived on the 10th floor. Bezi Duras lived on the 14th. We knew this because we sometimes got caught in the elevator when she summoned it and had to ride up and then interminably back down with her, and her powerful tobacco smell, and the three huge, barrel-chested black dogs who towed her around the neighborhood at sundown.

  Small and sharp-featured, Bezi was a source of fascination for all. She had come to the city after some faraway war whose particulars nobody, not even my mother, seemed to fully grasp. Nobody knew where she’d gotten such fine clothes, or what connection she had managed to press to get herself into the Morningside. She spoke to the dogs in a language nobody understood, and the police came around every so often to check whether the dogs had finally overpowered and eaten her, as they were said to have done to some poor bastard who tried to rob her on one of her walks. The incident was only a rumor, of course, but it was enough for the building to begin petitioning her to get rid of the dogs.

  “Well, that’ll never happen,” my friend Arlo, who lived in the park with his macaw, told me.

  “Why?”

  “Because, honey, those dogs are her brothers.”

  I was never under the illusion that Arlo meant this in some metaphorical sense. In fact, he’d heard it from the macaw, who’d heard it from the dogs personally. They had been beautiful boys once, charming and accomplished; but somewhere in the course of Bezi’s journey from her homeland to ours, life made it impossible for them to accompany her in their God-given forms. So according to Arlo, Bezi had struck a bargain with some entity, who turned them into dogs.

  “Those dogs?” I asked, thinking of their foam-coated jowls and furrowed faces.

  “They do make an impression. But I guess that’s the point.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, they’re more welcome here than most people, honey.”

  I gave Arlo a hard time about a lot of things, but I believed him about the dogs—mostly because I was eight and felt his macaw incapable of telling a lie. Also, there was plenty of evidence to favor his theory. Those dogs ate better than we did. Every other afternoon, Bezi would come back from the butcher’s laden with paper bags, and afterward the whole building smelled of roasted bones. She never spoke to the dogs in anything louder than a whisper, and they walked in a tight V around her when they left the building every night, never to be seen until the next morning, when she would come hurrying along the dawn-reddened street behind them as though only a matter of seconds stood between her and the total unraveling of her life. Her apartment, four floors above, had the same floor plan as our own, and it was easy to picture the dogs roaming around her cavernous place, following her with their yellow eyes, snoring on the white painter’s tarp I always imagined covering the floor.

  There were a lot of easily deducible things people missed about Bezi. That she was clearly a painter was the most significant one. Her ornate jackets and fine leather boots were always splashed with color. It darkened her nail beds, speckled her eyelashes, so bright that it was easily observable from the tree I sometimes watched her from at the end of the block, and in which the dogs occasionally sniffed me out, surrounding the trunk and roaring with frustration until Bezi’s head finally appeared below, and she started in on me in that rickety language she had brought from home.

  “You understand her, right?” I once asked my friend Ena, who had moved to New York from what I gathered was more or less the same place as Bezi.

  “No,” said Ena scornfully. “It’s a completely different language.”

  “It sounds similar.”

  “Well, it’s not.”

  Ena moved in with her aunt on the fourth floor only the previous year, after her family spent seven months at the quarantine depot, where Ena caught some illness—not the one for which she was being screened, mind you—and lost about half her body weight, so that when we walked down the street together, I felt obliged to tether her to me with one hand lest she blow away up the hill and into the river. She seemed unaware of her own smallness. She was grim and green-eyed, and had learned to pick locks in the camp (I always thought she meant camp as in summer camp; but she always called it the camp, which I eventually understood was different). Anyway, her lock-picking got us into parts of the Morningside that were previously inaccessible to me: the basement pool, for instance, with its dry mermaid mosaics; or the rooftop, which put us at eye level with the dark parapets of midtown.

  Ena’s curiosity made her a natural skeptic. She didn’t buy into all that stuff about Bezi Duras’s dog brothers turning into men from dawn till dusk—even when I laid out all the evidence and played Swan Lake for her.

  “Who turned them?” she wanted to know.

  “What?”

  “Who turned them into dogs for her?”

  “I don’t know—aren’t there people who do that kind of thing, where you come from?”

  Ena grew red. “I’m telling you, Bezi Duras and I don’t come from the same place.”

  All summer, this disagreement proved the sourest thing between us; impossible to reconcile, because it was dredged up every time Bezi set off down the street for the butcher’s.

  “What if we got into her place to see for ourselves?” Ena said one afternoon. “It wouldn’t be hard.”

  “But crazy,” I said, “since we know the place is guarded by a bunch of dogs.”

  Ena smirked. “If you’re right, though, wouldn’t they actually be men?”

  “Wouldn’t that be worse?” I had the sense that men in such a state would almost certainly be naked.

  The possibility of breaking into Bezi’s place would probably have continued to serve as a mere goad, had Bezi not paused where we we
re sitting on the park wall one bright afternoon and stared hard at Ena. “You’re Neven’s daughter, aren’t you?” Bezi eventually said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you know what they used to call your father, back where I come from?”

  Ena shrugged in a practiced way. Nothing could move her: not her dead father’s name, and not whatever Bezi said next in that language I couldn’t understand. She just sat there with her thin little legs pressed against the wall. “Sorry,” she said when Bezi finally quieted. “I don’t understand you.”

  I suppose I should’ve known this would seal Ena’s decision to break into Bezi’s place. But I was naive, and a little in love with her, and I had been there so often in my imaginary wanderings that it didn’t seem all that remarkable when Ena pressed the up instead of down elevator button the following week. I believe I did say, “Let’s not!”—only once, when Ena was already picking the lock, and only because I found myself sharply aware for the first time that we were, in fact, just kids.

  The apartment was exactly the same as mine: still white hallways, a too-big kitchen with a marble countertop as thick as a cake. We followed the smell of paint into a parlor where a piano should have been. Leaning up against the wall there, surrounded on all sides by smaller canvases electric with color, stood the biggest painting I’d ever seen. The strokes were choppy and ragged, but the scene was easy enough to make out: a young woman was crossing a bridge from some little riverside town. Around her stood three empty spaces where the paint seemed to have been scrubbed away; presumably, I realized, this was where the dogs climbed out when they turned into their human form.

  But they were not in their human form now. They were rousing themselves from a deep slumber where they lay sprawled out on that sure-enough paint-splattered tarp, sitting up one by one, as surprised, I think, to see us as we were to see them.