When he came out Tanja was a bit more relaxed and seemed more like a director who had things under control. Who knows what had been wrong before, he thought, but never mind, she was now giving him a look, bottled-up yet erotic. He knew he could, that he should, that “it was expected of him” to embrace the erotic charge crammed under the armor of civilization, which was in a way more present here, at the end of the world, than off in the crowds of Paris or New York. There, no doubt, he would have fucked the museum director in MoMA, he thought, if it were this empty, even with Marina Abramović watching, but here, in this touching provincial museum, his dick was completely absent and he had to force himself to think of Eros, not to forget it all, and this turned it into a strenuous sort of task, and all the while he couldn’t guess what would happen next even if they eventually got to sex. All these thoughts gave him a mild anxiety attack, but he had already gone to the gents and could not go back to take a Xanax. And what for, anyway? What kind of sex would that be, why go through all the trouble? It was easier to be alone and avoid it all, he thought, and suddenly—he was definitely the one who looked asthmatic to her now—as if he were out of breath, he said the museum was interesting, he should see it again sometime. This maybe sounded promising, so before he left, without knowing why, exactly—maybe it was a way of consoling her, because she had a look which said that she thought this was her fault—he kissed the director on the cheek and said, “You are wonderful.”
Now, he knew he shouldn’t have done that, although he was, in fact, being honest, because there was something wonderful about her; even so, he hadn’t meant it to sound as serious as he saw reflected in her eyes, which followed him out, he noticed, as if he were an officer and a gentleman. So he blew it, and they hadn’t even fucked. Damn.
Oleg was right when he called me a romantic, he thought. He didn’t get what was so romantic about all this, but the truth was that this would never have happened to Oleg. After visiting the town museum, he went to the factory, but he didn’t stay there long, he needed a drink, besides, everything was going along smoothly without him anyway: Hanka the secretary, whom Sobotka had rehired, was keeping the paperwork under control, yes, they’d also hired a younger woman who was handling the computer, and Sobotka was supervising the process in the workshop, so Nikola didn’t quite understand what he was supposed to be doing, except pretending to be a manager, which was maybe, he thought, the essence of being a manager.
He was brought back from his thoughts when the doors of the Blue Lagoon opened. For a moment his stomach clenched—please don’t let it be the museum director—but it was just Erol, Branoš, Sobotka, and a young woman.
• • •
Sobotka had run into Šeila, the woman they came in with. She’d once been best friends with his older daughter, Jasmina; she used to come by their house often and he was glad to see her, almost as if she were his daughter, though he hadn’t seen her for years. When they ran into each other in front of the bar, she asked, as always, after Jasmina. She used to really miss Jasmina, he thought, but now the questions were more her way of not forgetting their friendship. She asked about Jasmina as if she were asking about a person who was lost, someone she was not sure still existed, because Jasmina had left at the beginning of the war when she was fifteen, and ever since she’d lived in a different world, in the north. The way in which she asked after Jasmina was like the way Sobotka felt, as if he had a hole inside of him.
• • •
Sobotka’s life was clearly splitting into two very different halves.
In the mid-seventies he came to N. as a newlywed engineer, he was awarded an apartment by the factory, and apart from the strike-related episode, he led a life typical of the socialist middle class: he had his job, his family, his strolls through town most evenings with a drink or two; he went on the occasional outing to a restaurant with Zlata and friends, there were holiday visits to his folks in the village or her folks in a bigger city, and three weeks spent amid the heady scents of the Mediterranean in summer. Some of their vacations were spent at the factory resort, and some came out of his own pocket; he loved to travel and discover islands and always slept at campgrounds in tents he pitched skillfully with the not-so-skillful assistance of his two daughters. He remembered that he, both in the village and in the city, had often been crudely asked about whether he intended “to keep going,” meaning would he and Zlata go for a son. Questions like that felt like an insult to his girls. “Go where?” he’d say.
The nineties snapped him in half. The factory finally went bankrupt in the melee of the collapse of the old system and the state, followed shortly thereafter by the war.
As Sobotka refused to believe the war was coming, it happened that—when it did come—there was barely enough time for Zlata and the girls to pack their things. They managed to get out of the region on the last convoy, and their town soon fell into several years of isolation.
The convoy was pulled over in several places; they were taken off the bus and questioned, and all the money that was found was confiscated—the girls complained to him later, their voices despondent when they called him from the coast, newly in a different country—and soon after, when the accounts of rape began appearing on television, he was stricken by dread at the thought that, on their trip, something might have happened to Zlata and possibly Jasmina, who was fifteen, something they were reluctant to tell him, though he found roundabout ways to ask them many times. Jasmina always sounded sulky, not at all talkative, while Zlata sounded high-strung, speaking without much tenderness, though, truth be told, their bickering had already worsened during the time when the factory was going bankrupt; she nagged him about his drinking and his lack of ambition, which was why they stayed in the small town on the other side of the mountain when she was itching to move to a bigger city.
“We did well, we had a good life,” he used to say to her, but over time she grew bitter about the past. When she called from the coast where the former factory vacation resort had been transformed into a refugee center, she said they were sleeping in miserable conditions in overcrowded rooms, the locals were now treating them differently, the former hospitality was gone, everything was rigged, she’d never come back, she wanted to get as far away as possible. “When you were a tourist once in a place, and then you come back there as a refugee, you see everything with new eyes,” she said over the phone. “You see what your bond with the place really was. There was no bond, honey. I don’t exist. And worse, honey.” She said honey in a tone that implied he might be to blame for all of it.
He was sorry that even the good memories of the summer vacations he had taken the girls on would be soured for them. He talked to them, discouraged by the thought that there was nothing he could do, feeling he’d failed as a father and a protector because he hadn’t predicted what would happen. Why hadn’t he known what was coming? Because he was gullible, brought up in a culture of peace, and he started to beat himself up over this and loathe everything he’d believed until then, because all of it had betrayed him, cheated him, and was the reason his girls were now sleeping at a refugee center with no money and no father. He sensed they felt abandoned and harbored a silent hatred toward him which, Sobotka sensed, Zlata was encouraging. She soon started to blame him for the fact that he, too, hadn’t left town—this was when he started thinking she didn’t love him—having literally said on one occasion that he should have seen into the future, so, for a moment, he pictured himself poised on the prow of the family, in charge of gazing into the distance, no land in sight. She’d felt it coming, she said, while he said that’s not how it was. At the time she’d thought, He’s a man, he knows. “Ah,” she laughed sharply, “I thought men understood politics. No, you believe, you root for your team, you run, you’re . . . I won’t say what. Never again will I believe, never,” she said.
The question, he reasoned, was how he’d have fared had he been on their convoy. Maybe he’d be in a concentration cam
p today. At the time he thought it made sense to stay and guard the apartment, their only property; besides, he was liable for military service and had been told he couldn’t leave. But her accusations ate away at him; he knew he’d failed to protect his family. They were the ones on their own out in the cruel world, and he was here, in his slippers by the phone, trapped in his apartment and his misery, in a town where cigarettes and food were running low.
“It was all a lie, honey,” she said over the telephone. “Maybe everything had to fall to pieces so I’d see the truth. But the truth is useless, honey. I’m taking the kids and leaving so I can go to a place where people still lie to each other. I’ll have to figure out where, exactly. A place where lies are stable. That’s the place to be.”
“Zlata, what’s happening now is not the truth. It has all been twisted,” he wanted to console her, though he himself didn’t believe this anymore. “See, you’d like to go to a place where the lies are stable. But then they become the truth even there. Why not? Everything’s not quite so grim. This is all just a hiccup.”
“I can’t get past the hiccup.”
“We move forward.”
“Maybe I’ll forget if I can get away. If I forget everything.”
“Everything?”
He was already indifferent by the time he was called up by the army, demoralized by the emptiness of the apartment, the lack of work, the powerless anxiety. The news was horrifying, and Sobotka could see that one ethnic group was more prepared for war than the others; the leaders of that ethnic group were deliberate in their brutality; and their militia members—obviously following a premeditated plan—were driving out and killing people of other faiths, opening concentration camps, and perpetrating mass rapes. The other groups were not merely standing by, arms crossed, because, as Sobotka saw, evil spread like a virus among the warring parties. The tide of evil swept away before it all previous experience and made the world a different, unrecognizable place, very much like hell. This was the world where Sobotka was now living. Apart from that, Sobotka had been newly anointed as a member of an ethnic minority in N. Fortunately for him, his situation was not as bad as it might have been because the other two ethnic groups were the ones at war with each other in the region; if his compatriots had been over on the other side of the mountain he was aware that he’d have fared far worse. He knew people who’d fought against their own relatives to defend the town, yet, nevertheless, they were still mistrusted by others in the community. That would push you right over the edge, he thought.
Occasionally he’d hear that N. had been spared the worst, because it was so remote that it wasn’t worth fighting over. “You have no idea,” said a man, Berin was his name, who’d come on foot to the town—he had relatives there—after his rural unit fell apart and his village was torched; he’d made his way across the mountain with a hunting rifle and boots which he literally swore on—“I swear by my boots!” he said—because he knew all about edible plants, and he’d also killed a vulture along the way.
“A vulture?”
“A griffon vulture, a rare bird, but what can you do. It was flying in from somewhere, low to the ground, as if overfed.”
“You ate it along the way?”
“You have no idea, I’m telling you,” said Berin, which was supposed to mean they’d had it easy; they weren’t pleased about this—that they were clueless—and Berin, with people swarming around him at the bar, kept ordering drinks and asking others what they’d have.
When the bar owner requested that he settle the tab after last call, Berin said, “I haven’t got any money. I’m flat broke!”
He took out a frayed document with the stamp of a local, no-longer-existing community government, which confirmed that he was, indeed, Berin and had his own gun.
“Write it down, I’ll pay. I swear on these here boots.”
The bar owner pondered what to do with the man, he had men who dealt with people like this, but Berin flung wide his arms, repentant, and said, “Fuck it, I made it here alive, the drinks are on me.”
“So, roll up your sleeves . . .”
When he was called up, and they were being transported to more distant positions, Sobotka saw that things really did look worse everywhere else—all it took was stopping to take a piss and you immediately felt it in the air. There were cattle wandering aimlessly until somebody caught them. There were dogs on the loose. An evil wind.
He was not especially afraid of death. He moved zombie-like around the combat positions, but he functioned—an autopilot of sorts nudged him to react; he shot when necessary, ran at the last minute. The autopilot shielded him from depression, kept him from dwelling too much on his family. Animal-like he sharpened his focus on the here and now, because the here and now was so potent, so physically present, and everything else felt distant in space and time, so distant that making contact seemed hardly possible. He did call whenever he could find a working phone; he called the coastal resort, and sometimes he’d get through, but then he‘d be reticent, bumbling, rattled, like somebody communicating with the other side and invoking spirits. Numb, as if anesthetized, at times he’d be surprised when his familial, prewar personality surfaced mid-conversation, as if he were split in two. He was afraid he’d start crying, sobbing in front of his daughters, so he avoided emotional language—he was only tender with his youngest, Viktoria, and then his throat clenched and he’d cover the phone with his hand, and she told her mother she couldn’t hear Dad anymore and handed the phone back. During their last conversation from the factory resort, Zlata told him she’d be granted asylum in a northern country that was accepting refugees, she said this would definitely be a step up from where they were now, and he agreed, though he’d never been there, but, yes, undoubtedly things would be better there.
The telephone in his—formerly their—apartment, to which he sometimes returned from combat, no longer worked. He rarely spoke to them over the next three years, and even when he did find a functioning phone, he had to brace mentally for their conversations, because, in a way, he couldn’t explain anything anymore. He had to speak as if they were still in the same world, as if they still spoke the same language, yet they no longer were in the same world, nor did they speak the same language. So they adjusted to one another with hollow words patching up the silences. He felt no better after those conversations. They reminded him of a time with his commander, the man’s name was Tihan—they were forming the engineering technical unit at the time and had a bit to drink at the headquarters; Tihan wanted to pick Sobotka’s brain about several things as he was planning to promote him and pull him off active duty. Tihan, who said he wished his family had left, too, told him countless times, “Call them from here,” and Sobotka would say, “Thanks, I will, I’ll call the girls. You know what they’re like? Not just because they’re mine, but . . . Beauty. Soul and beauty.”
“Feel free.”
“I will, I haven’t heard from them in ages.”
He kept saying the words, but didn’t dial the number. He’d pour himself another drink while Tihan sat and watched him, already half-drunk, talk about his daughters, Zlata—such a beauty! “Both of us are blond, you know, and people often thought us foreigners. What a woman. You’d think she had to be from somewhere abroad.”
When the war ended, Zlata said she had no plans to return for now, she’d started a new life, the girls were in school, bringing them back would be a sin to the ruins and rubble where, if there ever would be a real peace, the hatred of war would linger until God-knows-when. He asked whether her new life meant she had somebody else, and she told him it was not about having someone, she had her own life, she was independent and still young for her age, forty-two. This stayed with him because he himself was forty-six, yet he felt old. He really thought of himself as an old man, and he was surprised to hear her say that. He and his wife, they’d been separated in time, he thought—he was in a place where time beat
faster.
Half a year after the war ended, once he’d taken care of the paperwork, he went to see them, there, in the northern land; he arrived and felt out-of-place: father, husband, guest. He could tell Zlata didn’t love him anymore; she saw him only as a reminder of a kind of dread. She’d invited him out of a feeling of obligation, for the girls, but she avoided him—a burden from the past. They didn’t sleep together.
He was out of his element there; he had no idea what he was doing or even how to do anything. They knew everything better than he did. He had to ask them how everything worked, like a grown-up child. He didn’t even know what to tell them—to poison the girls’ minds with the war, with what he’d been through, the horrible stories about what people can become, people you once knew—to poison them with those stories just because he could? He’d begin a story and then drop it, sinking into the silence of someone superfluous. As their father he asked about their lives, but everything sounded empty, a hollow shell, as if coming from a person who hardly knew them, asking how they were doing. Still, he completely embraced the role, adopting a fatherly tone, and they accepted this even though all of it seemed irksome and awkward to him. Zlata acted as if this was nothing but routine, as if she didn’t see problems in it. She even yelled at her daughters, “Answer your father’s question!” This only made things worse.
One of these days there when they found themselves alone in the apartment, he tried to stir Zlata’s memories by talking about the old days.
She listened to him, smoking nervously at the kitchen table, and then at one moment she interrupted him: “I know you cheated on me!”
His jaw dropped; for a moment he couldn’t remember what her words were referring to. He’d been through the war and everything, and now she was talking about something that happened during the strike? As if that still meant anything?
What is the statute of limitations on infidelity, anyway?
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