To him everything was close.
“You know I have hardly been anywhere.”
“Let’s go. Seven days,” he said.
“Let’s,” she said, hoping their story would take a twist.
“And then I’ll spend a month in D.C. attending a training program,” he added.
He said that in the singular. The trip to Istanbul felt about them saying their goodbyes, but she said nothing.
“Sure. I’ll visit my parents after Istanbul. I haven’t seen them in a while.”
Istanbul, Constantinople, was so magnificent, but in a dark way, as if overcast by a shadow, obscuring access. They used to rule over her people from there, her family’s blood was part of the ramparts, she thought as she looked out over the gracious, ancient city full of both legible and illegible traces of culture, upheaval, and cruelty. She’d read somewhere that the city was besieged by the Turks for roughly a hundred years; they advanced toward the center of Europe before conquering Constantinople, the “second Rome,” which, after the fall of the “first Rome,” held out for a thousand years. Now she was there with Michael, an American who’d never heard a single epic song sung about Stamboul and who would return to his capital, which fancied itself as eternal, while she went back to her small town at the old outer verge of the empire. They walked the cobblestone streets, their love dragging behind them like a stray dog. Everything turned into backward glances, distance-gazing, and there at the Galata Bridge—where people were fishing as if idling away their days, old Turks, their faces furrowed with wrinkles, fishhooks in hand, straddling two worlds—an elderly, melancholy fisherman snapped a picture with Michael’s camera of them, hugging. Today, she sometimes looks at the picture and can still feel the impasse, the vestige of love dying with them, afraid to look each other in the eye.
He’d insisted on buying her things in Istanbul, as if outfitting her for her future life. She tried on dresses, she tried on bathing suits, she came out of the changing rooms to ask, “How do I look?”
There was so much between them that could no longer be put into words.
What gave weight to every breath was the love that was shifting to a memory before their very eyes, a sadness they could share with nobody; because lovers cannot console each other as they fall away—they can only avert their eyes and stare into the distance: ships navigating slowly through the reflection of the Bosporus. She sensed he was impatient to leave. He seemed guilt-ridden, like the old days, but this time they couldn’t talk. He’d only be able to talk, she thought, with a lover, or a whore, in Washington. He’d drink and weep, like he had with her. He’d be sweet with the lover, or the whore, while he spoke about her, a woman he used to love from a tragic country. He could no longer talk to her—that’s what he’d probably say to the new woman, while drinking with her—because lovers cannot talk about falling away. And that is why we ultimately grow apart. She’d like to see him, she thought, with this new woman as he drank and wept. Šeila would like to see how their story sounded when he told it to the third woman, she’d like to see his eyes. She’d like to see herself in his story, this leftover of what had been great, and if he never told their story, if he never drank and wept, it would be as if she’d never existed.
“Michael, tell me about this,” she told him in the quiet of a restaurant.
“About what?”
“Tell me the story, as if I were another woman. Like back then.”
“I don’t understand, Sheila. What am I supposed to tell?”
“About me.”
She did not want to say “us.”
He looked helpless.
“Imagine you’re in America. Or, imagine it’s been five, ten years, and you’re talking about me.”
He gazed briefly into her eyes, then shook his head as if he didn’t get it, and turned his eyes to the windowpane, to the mute hue of the street.
“Michael, tell me, because I don’t know . . . as if I were another woman. Tell me what this all meant.”
He looked down to the left, as if he were trying to see into himself.
“It was beautiful, so much so that it erased itself,” he finally said. “We erased an entire world, Sheila, but never made a new one.”
Later, they made love in their hotel room, the windows open to the sky. Michael seemed his old self again, with his sadness and tenderness, but he lacked courage in the way he touched her body, how they made love, as if he feared he was taking advantage of her.
She watched Michael, asleep beside her. She turned over onto her side and surveyed their clothes scattered on the floor and her naked reflection in the big mirror.
They parted at the airport: his plane was to leave first. He wore a helpless expression, his eyes wandered. Then he arched his eyebrows and looked at her with a child’s gaze, and they hugged each other, tightly, so she could hear his heart pounding, she pressed her lips to his and said, “Take care, Michael. . . . Be safe, kid.”
He murmured, “I’ll call you.” He spun around, headed for the international security check—his back in a dark blue suit. With his head bowed, he waved over his shoulder a few times. At the barriers he turned around once more, unexpectedly, stopping for a moment, like a sad clown, then disappeared.
I want you to know that I loved you. She wanted to shout to him this desperate, stupid sentence—but she couldn’t speak, like in one of those dreams when you are unable to do things you normally do.
Then she sat down and slumped over—her hands in her hair—on one of those rows of chairs. Her plane wouldn’t be leaving for another two hours. Arriving at the boarding gate, she grabbed a free newspaper, opened it, and stared at it so nobody could see her eyes.
It was the Turkish Daily, a newspaper in English. At first she just held it open, but then she noticed a headline about the sale of a Georgian electric power company: “75% of Company Sold to US Corporation SAE for Equivalent of US$25.5 Million via International Tender.”
When they were kids, she and Jasmina loved to watch jet planes flying across the sky—their contrails, those white lines melting into the blue, were poetry to them, although they didn’t know the word contrails then.
They couldn’t imagine those planes as anything but tiny objects in the sky leaving behind them a fragile trace, and yet they’d been told by the grown-ups that people were sitting inside those planes, and that those people could see them from up there.
And someone once said—one of the other kids—that the people were called Americans, the teeny-tiny people in the airplanes.
Just like that, Michael was now shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller, and she was returning to the country from which she used to gaze up at the sky.
11
I CHANGED AT one point when I saw how everybody else had changed. I changed, miraculously, into nothing, became indescribable, and, in this state I moved among people who no longer exist, because they’d been taking blows morning till night to the head and ears, they’d been flexed like a muscle and stretched, curled, stooped and furled, pounded into the dirt, dredged, and tilled with a pick, until up they sprouted anew, fertilized and slightly artificial. Though they looked real they were all cultivated, raised in a greenhouse like a celestial television, and now they’re limping around with their new gadgets, I see, they’re all in constant contact, all day long they’re walking around like they’re embroidering and stitching needlepoint, talking to themselves out on the street, and I’m crazy? Me, the crazy one? Because I yell? They’re the ones talking to themselves on the street as they walk, with wires hanging from their ears or little boxes in their pockets or their hands, and it won’t be long before they start talking at a run, because they’d love to talk and run, obviously, but you can’t pull that off physically, until a species capable of such things evolves, and they have nothing to chase, otherwise they’d be running, obviously, otherwise they’d run and chase and words would spew out a
s they pant, and they’re catching something ahead of them, which they can’t yet see, but I see it, numbers, like the numbers on a cake, sugary numbers in all colors like ones for children, and abacuses for counters, and soot.
And two parallel lines that will never intersect even unto infinity, I see, two parallel lines, up close, but doomed never to intersect, I see, two parallel lines, and because they will never intersect, this is death.
I am not blind, yet.
• • •
Once he’d faced that his family was gone, Sobotka moved into a cottage with a yard. He had no reason to keep the three-bedroom apartment, or his absent family’s clothing, the children’s bedroom furniture, the toys, frozen time, his queen-sized bed with the built-in radio, the wardrobes from the late 1970s—all of it resembled a form of death.
In that apartment he left behind Zlata’s version of good taste, which, in the old days, Sobotka would quietly support in furniture stores selling merchandise produced domestically, but with foreign labels. The apartment still contained their living-room wall unit with built-in mirrors and internal lighting, lights which soon stopped working and he insisted they couldn’t be fixed, when in fact he was concerned that they were a fire hazard. He recalled the name of their bedroom set made of oak from a town on the plains. Ophelia, which sounded posh to him at first, but then someone told him it was a bit odd as a name for a master bedroom and suggested he reread Hamlet.
“Reread?”
Zlata’s taste, he noticed while visiting them up north, had meanwhile changed; her furnishings now had simpler shapes, she no longer felt the need to “make every inch count,” and she spoke of her bedroom as feng shui.
He ultimately stopped believing in “a woman’s touch,” or in the notion that their apartment was attractive. He’d rather have rearranged it to his own liking, turned it into a combination of garage and factory, but he didn’t know what to do with the children’s bedroom furniture.
He needed to get away, and the people with whom he traded houses were convinced they’d got the better part of the trade—they moved into a nice apartment building with wooden floors and central heating, while Sobotka moved into a cottage. Not a terribly old cottage, but one built in the style of the old-fashioned rural houses in an area on the periphery of N. where there used to be a village. Soon enough, the town encroached upon the village with several small apartment buildings, but the town was now retreating again, so to speak. Around him lived people with last names that were traditional in these parts, and some of them had never stopped farming the fields around the town. But there were also newcomers who moved there to till the land. After the country’s industrial base collapsed, a return to the old ways was all the rage. Once socialism fell, traditions resurfaced in all realms, though family farms were not what most had in mind: they wanted the spirituality of the land, but a return is a return.
Sobotka himself kept a few beds of cabbages and onions in his garden, but most of the yard was given over to the metal sculptures he had been obsessively welding. There was nothing traditional about them. He welded scrap metal to car headlights. The sculptures looked like weird fantasy vehicles.
His avocation began for Sobotka when he participated in sculpture workshops the factory used to organize. Professional sculptors, even famous ones, did what they could to convince the workers—some successfully, some less so—that they, too, could become artists. Sobotka maintained that these artists said such things because they’d been told to. He couldn’t care less if he was called an artist or not—better not, he thought—but the beauty in this for him was the discovery of something he’d never had as an engineer: he could work on something without knowing the direction it would take, or how it would turn out. When asked, he’d say it relaxed him, although he felt he needed a better word. He found a certain pleasure in sculpting he’d never found elsewhere. There were no guidelines. If he wanted to, he could make something “wrong,” he could make anything.
So one time, while having a drink with a sculptor who was running a workshop—a melancholy older fellow whose last name began, he recalled, with the letter R—Sobotka told him what he enjoyed about the craft. The fact that he could create anything.
“Well that settles it then! You’re an artist.”
“I am no artist. Heck no!”
“Why?” asked the sculptor, taken aback.
“Look, I like doing this, but I’d rather not be called an artist. Why would I want to be an artist?”
“Wait a minute, are you saying being called an artist is a sort of insult?”
“Er,” Sobotka took a moment. “This is a little risky for me. . . . If the guys at the factory start calling me an artist, I’d be better off having stayed out of it.”
The old sculptor laughed heartily. “That’s right! So for you being called an artist is an insult!”
“No, it’s not that,” Sobotka said, trying to explain. “It’s just that if I consider myself an artist, I’d have responsibility. You know, art, quality, all that jazz. But I couldn’t care less! I can do things the wrong way if I feel like it. See?”
The sculptor’s face turned serious.
“And I want the freedom to not give a shit!”
“You’re right,” said the sculptor. “You’ve reminded me of something I’d forgotten.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve been an artist for a long time. . . . But you’re right, I need to forget I’m an artist!”
Sobotka found this perplexing, but in a way it made sense.
“Look, I don’t know if you can forget you’re an artist. . . . But, yes, I do forget I’m an engineer.”
The old sculptor looked at him, made a toast, and emptied his glass.
“I must forget I’m an artist and then I’ll be free again!”
“You—do whatever suits you,” said Sobotka, feeling a bit uneasy. The artist was thinking he was smart, and he didn’t want to say something stupid to spoil his image.
This sculptor, whose last name always eluded him, though Sobotka thought it began with an R, poured him another drink and said, “Well, thank you!”
This funny conversation would sometimes pop up in Sobotka’s mind, especially when he saw certain artists—there were several in his small town—and noticed they seemed unhappy. Their art must have become a burden. One of them who had an academic degree in painting—or something like that—would always say he was “living in the wrong place,” and a young sculptor would say he had “nobody to work for here.” The young man stepped into Sobotka’s yard once, looked around, and said, “Interesting, interesting.” He looked washed out, smoked quite a lot, and probably drank a lot, too. Sobotka asked him what he did.
The guy said he hadn’t sculpted for two years now. He was done. He had to get out of this place.
“You would like to be somebody in this world?” Sobotka asked, feeling sorry for him.
The youngster just looked at him. He left. Sobotka hadn’t seen him since.
During his years of unemployment, Sobotka pretty much cluttered up his garden and yard with what he called his “ironware.” He began to wonder where to put all his sculptures. He thought about asking Nikola if he could place some of them around the factory, but he felt a bit uncomfortable suggesting it. Not so much because of having to ask Nikola, but because of the workers.
He noticed that his neighbors had begun to see his garden as somewhat alarming. Had Sobotka not been such a good handyman—“Hands of gold,” they said—they would not have respected him much.
In any case, they didn’t visit often.
Sobotka thought about this while he shaved—an old morning habit he’d returned to since returning to his old job, after years of neglect.
He heard a knock at the door.
Half-shaven, with shaving cream all over his face, he opened the door.
Before him stood t
he man with the dog.
Sobotka looked at him as if examining wreckage that had suddenly washed up on shore. He stood speechless, the shaving cream still smeared over his face.
No, this visitor he had never expected. He knew the man’s story well and had tried many times to approach him, but stopped trying ages ago because the man with the dog never wished to talk to Sobotka; in fact the man shunned him, as if Sobotka were a stalker. And as he was running away he flailed his arms, raising them to the skies like a person making an announcement, or perhaps protesting—it was hard to tell the difference—and yelled out his mantras: “This dog has no master, ha ha ha!”; “Liberty! Cunt! Ha ha!”; “We are the best! Ha ha ha ha! Eat it!”
“Slavko,” said Sobotka.
The man with the dog kept blinking and staring, as if frozen, with flakes of dandruff in his graying black beard. The dog was just as calm. Sobotka felt an eerie atmosphere arising from the silence coming his way in place of a reply: the man’s eyes looked as if they were staring from behind bushes.
The primeval fear of unfamiliar beasts.
But it’s still Slavko, I can’t pretend it isn’t. Maybe I shouldn’t call him by name, maybe that bothers him, he thought.
“Come in?” said Sobotka, stepping aside.
The man with the dog observed him, as if he were so far away that recognizing faces was a struggle.
He just stood there, as if watching the scene from a hill, only to finally enter the house, dog by his side, passing Sobotka, who, for a moment, felt a chill again. Not because he feared the man with the dog—he’d overcome his animal instinct—but because the past had just stepped into his cottage: Slavko, his companion, his disfigured past that no longer responded when you called its name, who wandered around like a haunted ghost. Slavko—his best man, his scarecrow, his mirror.
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