Later that day when he came home, he made love to his wife Zlata.
He later found out that their youngest daughter was conceived that day, which, in the end, brought him back into the marriage.
He never managed to explain that day to himself.
• • •
No, he didn’t find anyone to replace Veber. How was he supposed to find a director he’d be prepared to raise another strike against?
He thought about this a lot later on. What should he have done? The old man seemed to be making his final move and exacting his revenge by saddling him with this burden.
Later, he felt weirdly responsible for everything that happened next. Had the workers from Solidarity felt the same way? Sobotka kept up on Lech Wałęsa, afterward; he watched him on TV as the president of Poland and tried to figure out what exactly Wałęsa had done, besides overthrowing their socialism, or communism, or whatever it was.
I did not want to become the director, but he became president, so I guess he knew what he was after, thought Sobotka to himself. However, as time passed, it appeared to Sobotka that Wałęsa did not know what to do, either, just like him, who never in his life had felt better than during their strike, and who had since that time felt progressively smaller and smaller, eventually turning into plankton.
The memory remained that he’d once been part of something big, back then in the factory. But in a way, he could no longer explain the memory.
He often heard people praise him for tearing down communism. During the war this granted him a certain immunity. He would sometimes use it to tell new punks, “Where were you when I was tearing down communism? Where were you when I was a person of interest to the secret police?”
That shut them up.
He was actually called in a couple of times for questioning, but Sobotka was nonchalant and quiet. So they came up with different tactics and started intercepting him at bars, casually showing up right next to him, hoping he’d blurt something out after a couple of beers. They tried to cozy up to him in their characteristically venal way. A particularly clumsy guy—Sobotka called him ‘The Log’—was assigned to him.
“You Catholic, Sobotka?”
“By heritage.”
“Do you believe?”
“On occasion.”
“Ha ha. On occasion! Way to go. Why not join the Party then?”
“No rush.”
“And your wife is German?”
“Partly.”
“German maiden name.”
“Wow, you’re well informed. Or perhaps it’s Jewish?”
“No shit! Really?”
“Look into it.”
“Or maybe you are a Catholic Unionist like the Polish guy?”
“My wife is Orthodox, if you must know.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Catholic Unionist? Really? Do you know all about the ethnic makeup of this place?”
“I do actually, which is why I’m surprised.”
“I’d be as well.”
“There you go . . .”
However, all this dismayed him. He did not like being questioned. His wife Zlata used to say, “the children will pay their debts,” because at the time everyone still believed the system would last forever.
• • •
A few months after the strike, the new director arrived. A so-called technocrat, supposedly an expert, who did not even bother moving to N., but instead traveled to and fro daily in a company car. Later, the workers went on strike again, but there was probably too much of that going around: strikes were in the news every day, the whole system was on the verge of striking, and the turbine factory was no longer big news.
Not even The Log cared anymore; he and his protegees were dealing with God-knows-what-else by that time.
Sometimes Sobotka would see Veber on the street. They ‘d usually wave from a distance, but on one occasion, when they almost collided at the door to a bakery, Sobotka had to stop. He already knew the old man was going to lecture him, but he was surprised by the manner in which he did so: “The Party is full of assholes and the workers are fools. But bear in mind, the state still belongs officially to the workers, so take advantage of this. Why don’t you take over the factory? They won’t know what to do with you.”
The old man had a confident ring to his voice that caught Sobotka off guard because they’d never been close. Look at that, he thought, he’s a little odd and treating me like his successor.
“All right then, how would you do it?”
“You gather the class-conscious ones and then you move.”
Sobotka laughed at the old man’s communist rhetoric and said, “Move where, into the woods?”
The old man took offense, and as he was leaving he said, “Laugh all you want. The battle will be fought. The only question is whose side you’ll be fighting on.”
Sobotka thought about how the old man said whatever he damned well pleased because he had the immunity of an old partisan, while he, Sobotka, could not talk like that.
He followed him.
“What battle?”
The old man turned around and as if chastising a weak student, said, “Don’t you know? If workers don’t fight for unity among themselves, they’ll be turned against each other!”
When Zelda heard that Sobotka’s wife was pregnant, she told him, “It’s not because you screwed me over, it’s because you’re a coward.”
She left in her orange Citroën Dyane, and he never saw her again.
His world closed in on him once again, but he got through it.
His daughter was born; she kicked her feet a lot. A silly image perhaps, but that was how he remembered her.
With his first daughter, Jasmina, he was serious; with Viktoria, whose name he chose, all he could do was laugh. People said parents are often more relaxed with the second child, and perhaps the laughter was his escape, along with the subtle, habitual smell of alcohol. Zlata was not amused.
When talk began of a 30 percent worker surplus at the factory, nobody wanted to strike any more out of fear of being counted among the surplus, and the anger they felt was diverted to big rallies held under national flags in different parts of the country, covered regularly by the news. There were some people from his company, fellow strikers in fact, who traveled to rallies on pre-arranged buses and returned as a closely knit group. He didn’t want to believe this, though he did notice that they kept their distance from him.
Sobotka was no longer the leader of anything.
When the Communist Party announced the first democratic election, and power was divided between the parties of the three ethnic groups, he tried to be as happy as Wałęsa and the other new leaders like him in other countries. But Zlata was worried again because she’d heard that a war might break out, so he shared this happiness only with Viktoria.
• • •
Sobotka walked through the cold factory as if walking through a cemetery where nobody remembered the people buried there or what had happened to them.
His forgetting went deeper than the years that had passed; he felt as if there were something like a vacuum inside him. A fissure that reduced his memory to chaos. He realized he’d forgotten what he used to be like then, he’d forgotten the world that once existed.
I am a different person now, he thought, and everyone I know is, now, different. This was the first time he truly understood. Those people from before are gone. The people of today are nothing like the people back then. They’ve all had their ears boxed and their tails whipped.
Suddenly he thought about the first time he ever heard about snipers. He was flabbergasted. Did this really happen? He’d pictured war as skirmishes on the front lines. But someone picking people off on the street at random with gunfire—this was something he couldn’t wrap his mind around. Yet somebody was shooting, a b
east, and whoever assigned that person the job was the creator of today’s person, thought Sobotka.
This kept him tossing and turning in his restless sleep full of jumbled scenes, disparate images from the life he was living now and his old life, nightmares that left him drenched in sweat—all because of the investor who’d appeared out of the blue to take him back to that world, a world he could no longer imagine. The interloper had lured Sobotka back into this factory, which he had only seen from a distance for years. Yes, he’d seen it, but he’d never really looked at it.
Had Sobotka believed in ghosts, he’d have said the ghosts were here.
Then he thought, What does insanity look like on the inside? How and from where did this man appear?
He had been drinking for years, as much as he could; the previous night as well, at the tavern where he was to fix the wiring. He wondered, could this be his last hangover? Could what this man is saying be possible? He said we’d do everything the way we used to. Our old turbines, the old way? I guess that is what insanity looks like on the inside.
All I need now is a black dog.
Sobotka turned around and looked at Oleg; he was standing outside at the entrance, calmly, watching Sobotka in the dim light, to see if he was real. And again, they were telling him to do it his way, like Veber just before leaving. He wanted to shout, Don’t toy with me! but stopped himself. If he is here to invest, he thought, and I threaten him like that, he’s going to think I’m crazy. And if I’m hallucinating, it makes no sense to talk to him, either. What would be the point?
Good, he concluded, his reasoning still functioned.
He walked on to the turbine assembly area. The huge rotor base was still covered, preserved. He remembered how he, Arman, and Slavko had seen to that, at a time when they’d already stopped receiving their salaries.
They’d done it well—you could still tell.
Then he inspected the concrete they’d poured around the base. He smiled wistfully. How did we have the willpower? We really did believe. But he couldn’t remember who or what it was they’d believed in. They simply believed it would be insane to just let everything go to ruin. They poured the concrete and were done with it. There.
It was still here. Twenty years later.
Nikola had lit his fourth cigarette. He was feeling chilly.
“How much longer are we going to be here?” he asked Oleg.
“Let the man walk around the whole place.”
“It looks more like he is wandering.”
“This place is his life story,” Oleg said. “He’s exactly the guy I need.”
“Yeah, you can tell he’s the guy,” Nikola said. “An old-school loser.”
5
“IT’S LIKE THIS, I work as a plumber. Below my paygrade, but hey. The money’s not bad, and this suits them bigtime: they pay us way less than they pay their own people, and besides we work harder because we know we’ve got nowhere else to go. The place is a whole little city, there are a couple of camps, and you can hear folks swearing in our language all over the place, just like the old days in our army here, except for the American commanding officers. Okay, I’m kidding, there are others, too, the entire Non-Aligned Movement’s over there.”
“Go on. I’m not laughing.”
“Look, there are tents that accommodate a hundred, but some hold up to three or four hundred! Think about it—four hundred men to a tent. Or a hundred, same thing. And everyone’s there: Indians, Filipinos, us, everybody. It stinks like fuck! Who knows who doesn’t shower, I don’t want to be a racist, there are guys from around here who don’t shower, either, and don’t forget the boozers, so when the night starts to swelter and they strike up with the snores, it’s like a frog-infested swamp in there. And the latrines, what can I say, they make you want to puke. It’s a twelve-hour-straight shift, no lunch break, eat out of a can on your feet. Then I was transferred to a small FOB, a forward-operating base, you might call it a camp, and that was less crowded. But every other second you’re crouching somewhere in a bunker. There were casualties, all sorts of shit, shellfire. It’s no normal gig—it’s stress, you wear a vest and a helmet, and you walk around the place yet you know the place hates you. And now I hear some guys want to go there for peanuts? I mean, I know times are tough, but that’s not the way.”
“Oh, come on, it all depends on where you land. My neighbor’s son is over there, in Jalalabad or whatever it’s called. She says there’s no action there, her son sleeps like a baby. I mean, his mother ought to know. He goes to the gym and he’s bulking up, she showed me a picture. I know the guy, he used to be scrawny, he must be popping those American pills. There’s nothing for me here. This recession, it’s not getting any better, even abroad, let alone here. And the Americans will always print up more dollars even when they run low.”
“First of all, some folks don’t read their contracts; everything’s there in black and white. Does it say there’s a likelihood of hardship? Does it say this is a war zone? Okay, it doesn’t spell out the latrines and the snoring, but there you have it. You’re grown-ups, literate—some more than others, sure—although the recruiter doesn’t care about that. All he cares about is whether you’ve signed on the dotted line. If you’ve signed, he figures you’ve read the small print. I’ve heard people demand a certain salary, I wouldn’t bet on that, speaking from experience, because I saw subcontractors over there, they were brought in by a company and were paid four to six hundred bucks a month, I swear, they’re on a two-year contract and given no leave. Not even for funerals. They get food, where to stay, laundry, no expenses, so it’s worth it for them because where they’re from there’s zero standard of living. Keep that in mind, too. The subcontractors are competing with you. Tell the recruiter whatever you like, but he’ll choose. In my experience, the important thing is to get in the door. I used to work in a really fucked-up FOB, so my bio looks way better now, and an American looks at you differently after you’ve proved yourself and made the rounds. The recruiter even came to me this time.”
“I know, man. Tell me, are they paying you to offer folks less or what?”
“Watch it, bud. I find jobs for people, and if you don’t want a job, forget it! I’m not here to sweet-talk anyone, all of you have the freedom to choose. This is all about personal choice. Truth is, the salaries are lower now than when we started. But can you bring that much in anywhere else? You know best. You have the information. Nowadays everyone has access to information and there are no secrets here. I’ve already laid everything out for you, no point in repeating. But I will say: this is not required. It’s the Americans and you have the freedom of choice, take it or leave it.”
“Hell, I’d go just to get away from here. If it’s that bad for you, why don’t you come back and leave me your post of, what was that you said? Plummer? I can do plums! You want to talk me out of this, like everything sucks over there, but you’ve been there for years. There’s a sweet Škoda Oktavia in your garage, you’ve added another floor to your house. Cut the crap!”
“Listen, are we going to discuss how to negotiate the salary tomorrow, or is everyone willing to work for peanuts? That’s why they cut the salaries in the first place. Look, there’s nowhere to go when you’re there, no freedom, you live like a dog. The salary should compensate for that.”
“I know, sure, but money is tight everywhere. I’m actually fine with having nowhere to go while I’m there, I’d spend all the money otherwise. This way I know I’ll save.”
“I fucked up with a bank loan. I have to get out of the red, and when things get tough, you can’t be picky. I’d ask for more, but when thousands of people are in trouble like you, they’re competition. You can’t be picky if they aren’t. That’s life, what can you do?”
“That’s exactly what I am saying. If you aren’t picky, you’re ruining it for the rest of us. I know, times are tough, but that’s exactly how they are tryi
ng to get their hands on you dirt cheap. Trust me, they’re in no crisis. I say we can get more, I was there, I know, so don’t say you’ll work for peanuts right away, or you’ll screw it up for yourselves and for me!”
“I’m out of options. I am going at all costs. I’ve made up my mind!”
“At all costs? Why not volunteer then? And don’t forget: bring your own food.”
“I went to war, and I’m not scared of war or work! It’s easy for you to talk! You struck it rich. This is our turn now.”
“Go ahead, I’m not standing in your way. But take this friendly piece of advice. The war you already fought in counts as experience. If you volunteered then, don’t volunteer now.”
“You’re getting on my nerves, I swear! Watch it!”
“Temper, temper. Watch your nerves. You’ll need them once you find your footing over there.”
“I’m not scared of anything.”
“Then why go for plumber? Why not apply straightaway to escort convoys, that’ll get you the most points. Your bio will be amazing. But don’t tell the other guys you’re volunteering. They’ll shoot you.”
“I’m leaving before I punch him.”
“Hear that, Erol? He wants to punch me.”
“I did.”
“You guys! This is not working, let’s . . . So, tomorrow at the hotel, first floor, a lady will be on the right as you come in, give her your passport.”
“Fine! But brothers, just remember that we blew this on our own!”
Sobotka, Oleg, and Nikola were sitting in a booth in the corner of the bar, where they could hear this discussion loud and clear.
“Just a moment,” said Sobotka. He walked over to their table. They were about to leave.
He patted the stocky young man with short curly hair on the back and the man turned his boxer’s mug.
No-Signal Area Page 4
