“You know when I found out? Down there at the resort, when we were refugees. That you had a whore at the factory. Just so you know—finding that out . . . That was just what I needed then.”
He wanted to tell her it didn’t matter, he wasn’t that man anymore; time had passed.
But he said something stupid, something that had meaning only for him: “That . . . That was before the war.”
“So what?” she said, getting up from the table and looking at him as if everything was now settled.
She stood there, leaning against the sink, her arms crossed, her expression stern, staring beyond him.
That was before the war, he repeated to himself, and then realized that everything he was looking for here was from before the war.
“You’re right,” he said. “Everything has already happened.”
Not for me, she thought. For you maybe, but not me. She didn’t want to be cruel; she knew there was no point in saying that. But she knew exactly what she wanted just then—she wanted him to leave. He’d cheated on her. He deserved it. She had every reason to start over.
She had dreamed several times how he’d come and how she’d have to tell him that, and then fear would swamp her in her sleep, fear of the fact that she was not a good wife, fear she’d betrayed him, fear of everything going on back there, in the country from which the fears came in her dreams. She was afraid to declare everything over. He still lived there and was clutching at her heel like a zombie.
But now she knew.
“You cheated on me,” she repeated; this repetition seemed redundant to him.
“Tell me,” he said, looking at her, “is this just an excuse? Did you ever love me before that?”
She frowned and looked down, staring, as if asking herself whether she owed him an answer, and said, “Truth be told, I can no longer remember how it was. I loved you at first, sure, but afterward . . . That was the world we lived in and I respected it. That world was . . . set that way by default. I can’t remember now how it felt . . . I was inside it. I never thought about being different.”
She paused and lit a fresh cigarette.
“When I heard you’d cheated on me—down there of all places, a woman told me at the refugee center, there, where I’d seen what our world had come to—I could finally say my goodbyes to our world. If you hadn’t cheated on me, I wouldn’t have. But, there, that may have been what saved me. I no longer cared about looking back.”
She glanced at him, he at her, and in a way he appreciated her for being so frank, for telling it how it was, and then he realized she really was a different woman sitting there across from him. She was no longer the same Zlata—she was someone else who, it just so happened, was talking about how he’d cheated on her. “Don’t think that . . . ” she continued, “It’s not that I didn’t care what happened to you. But . . . with every day everything grew farther and farther from me and . . . I said to myself: I have to raise these children. I have to make myself different. And there it is. I’m not going back. If that’s what you came here for, it’s over . . . Our world has evaporated, it’s gone.”
“I’m glad you said that,” he said, hunched over in the chair. He thought of adding how grim his days had been here, in their house. For him, he wanted to say, those days had been even worse than the war itself; only now did he see that there was nothing left for him. But, instead, he just stared.
“Ah, Zlata, my Zlata,” he said. “I think I’ll go now.”
Slowly, like an old man afraid to make a wrong move, he stood.
“I wasn’t going to tell you to go,” she said, and as if something had moved her, she put a hand to her mouth and took a step back toward the window. She didn’t know where this was coming from. She’d been waiting a long time for this final tie to be sundered, but now that it was happening, she felt a faraway pang.
“It’s difficult for me to be here. I need to leave now.”
“Won’t you wait for the girls? I mean . . . I didn’t . . . Not without saying goodbye, for their sake,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Right now. I can’t be here anymore.”
She saw in his eyes that he couldn’t; she could still read his face.
“Tell them to come whenever they want,” he said. “My home is their home.”
It didn’t take him long to pack. When he emerged from the room with his bag he stood in the kitchen doorway and said, “I’ll sell the apartment. It’s too big and empty for me. I’ll send you half of the money.”
“No need,” she said without a second thought. “Leave something for the girls and give it to them later.”
“I’m sending you half, it’s yours.”
She stared straight ahead, trying to focus on this. Maybe because of the guilt she was feeling, or because she’d crossed out all that had happened down there, almost stuttering, she said, “You needn’t . . . What you can get for it won’t go far here . . . but it could be a help for you.”
He gazed briefly into her eyes and for a moment she seemed like the old Zlata.
If only she hadn’t said that.
He left.
She watched him through the window as he was walking away down the empty street and silent tears ran down her face.
Big and stocky and slow as he was, he floated down the street.
And then, though she knew she shouldn’t, she thought about how she’d loved him once, how he’d seemed sturdy and strong, how proud she’d been of him, and then she remembered herself, herself from that life, her first pregnancy when they listened to the baby—Jasmina—kicking inside her belly. Why was she remembering that now, where were these images coming from?
She shook her head.
Then she started to shake. She wasn’t crying, just shaking. He moved out of sight, she couldn’t see him for the hedge.
He was gone. Everything was gone. She was alone now, outside it all.
But I’ve known this for a long time, she said to herself, shaking, I’ve known this for a long time, it’s nothing new . . . Calm down.
She couldn’t stop shaking, like someone naked in the wind.
She reached for her cell phone and, barely hitting the keys, called the man she was in a relationship with; she hadn’t told Sobotka about him. He answered the phone in their language; she was at a loss for words.
He asked, in their language, “Is everything all right? Say something! Hello? Is that you?”
She wanted to say, “He’s gone,” but her words made no sense.
“Did he do something to you?” he shouted, agitated, at the other end of the line.
Yes, she thought. But that wasn’t what she needed to say. She was on the edge of what was real, by the window, staring at the shaking empty street. She’d pull herself together, now she’d pull herself together and see what was real and what she should be feeling.
“Hello? Zlata! Did he do something to you? Zlata?”
9
LIGHT SNOW SWIRLED gently, swept up from the ground by a quiet force from above. The day would be clear, dry, one that would sober you up as soon as you stepped outside.
The mountains were sharply visible. Black forests with patches of snow. He knew they were green, but from here they looked like a moth-eaten wool sweater on the body of a big black woman. Like the black forest of Germany, he thought. Whoever came up with that name must have seen forests like these from afar.
Was anybody there? If so, they certainly had quite a view. He would be very calm, he felt, if he were up there, watching.
He looked toward the road.
The mailman had encountered a man with a dog; they were all standing by the side of the road while the dog was bounding around the mailman’s feet, apparently trying to play. But the mailman didn’t even look at the dog; he just stood there like a soldier frozen at attention.
The mailman looked as i
f he wanted to hand something to the man with the dog. The man with the dog raised his hands as if he were encountering a glass barrier.
The mailman was holding something; an envelope, or was it a package, or a bomb, and the man with the dog stepped away, hands raised.
Now the dog was barking at the mailman, you could hear it through the double-paned glass.
Then the man went his own way with the dog, while the mailman stood there, his head slightly tipped.
Nikola watched all of this from his window.
A cutting north wind quietly swirled the dry powdery snow that had fallen during the night.
Gone . . . Gone . . .
The thought, gone, wouldn’t leave him.
He thought about Šeila. He wondered if the miracle was starting, when your spirit is charged with blood and you’re so physical yet virtual, so much a part of life. Was this what he was leaving for the younger generation?
The first night he met her they barely spoke—Erol hovered around her, and from the sidelines, Nikola watched Erol mark a space around the young woman with his body, tell her something with his lively face and laughing eyes—he was clearly trying his luck with jokes—by speaking close to her ear, and how in time he went from enthusiasm to more insecurity, until he eventually gave up, though she didn’t move away from him and she smiled, but apparently not in the right places. He watched the slow crumbling of an alpha male’s performance through the eyes of another alpha male, without a trace of solidarity. Erol’s face cooled, he scratched himself behind the ears, and then, after a time, he stopped fencing her in, so even Branoš was within reach, while Erol moved away to the bar as if he needed to catch his breath, not far from Nikola, who said, “Beautiful, huh?”
“Yes,” said Erol. “But not for me.”
Nikola looked at him, and even felt sorry for having rooted against him.
“How can you tell?”
“I just can . . . You know when a burly boxer like me spars with a person who has long arms and fancy footwork,” said Erol, scratching himself behind the ear.
“Wha?”
“You end up missing a lot is all.”
Nikola had no chance to talk to Šeila that night because while Branoš was trying his luck, the museum director showed up at the Blue Lagoon bar with her taut face and a look that said she was afraid she’d left something behind on her way out the door. She planted herself right next to Nikola and soon he had to think of ways to cool her mood, because she tended to turn any inkling of mutual understanding into ha ha euphoria. It’s awkward when your mission is to sour someone’s mood. It usually takes a while—until the other side decides you’re a bore, but the road there is a long one, especially when you’re dealing with skittish yet persistent women who, like the museum director, at one point say, “Oh, I see I’m boring you.”
They came to this, however, only after the conversation turned to the local chess club. Earlier, he’d tried with local soccer, more specifically by talking about the local team, known as the Turbines. But when Šeila was on her way out, his sad gaze followed her.
“Damn, what were we talking about?” he said just then.
“Ha ha, you sure are distracted! The Turbines are in the third league, as far as I know,” said the museum director.
The conversation went on.
He handled the subject well because people from the club had already hit him up for money, no doubt since the soccer club had been named after the factory. So Oleg shelled out for the sponsorship and Nikola was invited to a game where, standing next to the club president, he witnessed awful soccer. Even the whiskered president shot occasional glances at Nikola, arching his eyebrows and gesturing in despair. What can you do . . . The coach . . . Embarrassed, maybe a little overdoing it, the president shrugged as if seeing all this for the first time.
What can you do . . . All my life, I’ve . . . I’ve worked. But the entire system—the players . . . and the coach . . . and even the league—it can’t be done. No way . . . Impossible, trust me . . . When you think about it, where has my life gone? For what?
Nikola consoled the gentleman.
He noticed, however, that, despite everything, the club had a surprisingly large group of supporters known as the Turbos who mixed turbo-folk culture with hometown pride, creating an inextricable amalgam of depression and the waving of arms in the air. At one moment he thought he’d misjudged them because they came alive when they sang a song in which seven shots of Jäger were mentioned multiple times, and the chorus was—If my daddy could see me nowww . . .
“Is this an anthem of some sort?”
“Nah,” said the club president, before yelling, “Where are you going . . . Where?”
If my daddy could see me nowww . . . If my daddy could see me nowww . . .
Getting wasted, getting wasted . . . Seven shots of Jäger . . .
There was also a marginal group watching it all from their own corner, gathered around a band called Turban-Rap. When one of them heard Nikola’s question they explained how the chant had been taken from a viral Internet video of a young woman explaining how she celebrated the holiday of Bairam by drinking. Later they gave Nikola an MP3 of the song and asked for his sponsorship, so Oleg gave them some money. He listened to it and memorized the chorus:
Wound, salt, corrida, bull,
My team’ll never get a goal.
He mentioned some of this during his reluctant conversation with the museum director and asked impersonal questions about the club, keeping the conversation as far from their personal lives as possible, hoping he’d seem boring. But Tanja the director turned out to be a steadfast fan of the Turbines; she even knew that the seven shots of Jäger and the chorus with daddy came from the viral video.
“From her statement?”
“Yup. In a survey.”
“The song comes from a response to a survey?”
“Yes, yes,” laughed the director.
This even sounded interesting, but as he had to prove to the museum director that he was boring, he instantly switched to chess.
Because, apart from the disaster that was the local soccer club, an incomparably better chess club had also survived in the small town. Yes, Oleg sponsored them as well; chess was widely played, maybe because the game was suitable for long stretches of unemployment. People were training their minds and maintaining their self-esteem, and there were men in town who looked like bums but sported the title of Candidate Master.
Clarifying this with Tanja and apathetically gazing at the bar, Nikola talked about the sudden drop in interest in chess after the Cold War, about this being the game of a bipolar world, about the absurdity of the black and white pieces, the inertia of the king, the pointlessness of chess in the digital age, and pointlessness in general. He mentioned the twilit showdown between the computer and Kasparov, thinking this would bore the director to no end and she’d finally decide to talk to Erol, for instance, or maybe the entrepreneurial owner, Rafo, who was also there.
But then she said the infamous, “Oh, I see I’m boring you.” With a question mark.
“Oh, no you’re not. I’m boring you,” he said.
“I am. I’m boring you.”
“Look, I’m boring you!” he said a little sharply.
“What was that?” she asked with an intent look.
“Nothing, I feel kind of . . . lousy.”
“Just relax,” she said.
He felt a little foolish having the museum director tell him to relax.
Then he asked himself, All right, all right, what do I owe her? There’s nothing between us, nothing, zilch. I just thought about sex out of desperation, but then I changed my mind and gave up.
We could have a normal conversation if only she’d stop staring at me like that. This isn’t just a crush. It’s a full-fledged infatuation . . .
It’s a rela
tionship.
When someone has a crush on you yet you had nothing to do with it, that’s a special feeling. And when someone looks at you like this, with a crush, you’re ripe for Xanax.
What would have happened if we’d actually hooked up?
“I’m sorry. . . . Don’t be angry, I’m not in the mood for conversation today.”
She looked at him and said, “What does that mean?”
He looked at her, wondering what does she mean by, “What does that mean?”
“Well, it means that . . .” he started, but stopped. No, he couldn’t say something and then explain what it means. This could go on ad infinitum.
He wasn’t lying when he said, “I’m feeling irritable.” She looked at him intently. Then, to ease things, he said, “But it has nothing to do with you.”
After a pause, he added, “Other stuff. My bad.”
“Hmph, my bad.” She found his slang irritating.
“Pardon me, apologies, I’m sorry—whatever,” he said, thinking about how poisonous his irony was.
“All right, see you tomorrow,” she said, pursing her lips and picking up her handbag.
See you tomorrow. That actually surprised him.
Erol was laughing at him, he thought.
Nikola exhaled deeply and looked around to make sure the room was still there.
Then, he remembered that the interesting young woman had left and they hadn’t even had a chance to talk. He consoled himself by thinking she was too young anyway—still in her twenties.
He asked Sobotka, “How old is the woman you introduced me to?”
“Šeila?” Sobotka was trying to gauge how old his Jasmina was and was a little shocked by what he came up with. Jasmina had started school a little earlier, so Šeila could be “around thirty-three, thirty-four.”
The next day, Nikola talked with Branoš at the Lagoon about reorganizing tasks once the repair stage was finished. In various meetings over recent days Nikola mainly nodded sagely, while Sobotka proposed old experienced workers as managers of the production departments. The department teams were formed and the suggestions Sobotka made were readily accepted, with some reassigning here and there. For a few younger and more capable people like Branoš, a special department was established, and Sobotka filled them in on the engineering details. There was also something they called the “plant commission,” whose members were elected and whose function was to oversee “everything.”
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