Everything Slavko was now, he, too, could have become. Sobotka knew this. The only difference was that Slavko had had a little less luck: he’d had a son who wasn’t allowed to leave town like Sobotka’s daughters had, a son who’d turned eighteen. Slavko’s wife and daughter left on the same bus with his girls, and ended up, according to what Sobotka had heard, in a different northern country.
He remembered how their womenfolk had waved to them, him and Slavko, standing there watching the bus pull away. Slavko was a different man then, still they waved at their families together, went for drinks, and sat in silence for a long time. He remembered Slavko saying, “The world is going to hell, and we’re just sitting here.”
Sobotka didn’t remember whether he answered. That could very well have been the last sentence he’d heard from Slavko, not counting the shouts in the streets.
The man with the dog sat down at the kitchen table and exhaled wearily, as if this were just another visit and they were neighbors who had talked for so long that they’d run out of what to say to each other. The dog sat at his master’s feet.
Sobotka looked at him and said, “I’ll go make us some coffee.”
He found a clean dish towel and used it to wipe off the remainder of the shaving cream. He thought he probably looked like a madman himself with only half his face shaved, but never mind.
Then he said, “How nice of you to come by . . .” He looked over at Slavko and had no idea what to say next. “Right.”
As he poured the water for the coffee he kept thinking, What should I say? How should I talk?
He’d already had coffee and felt like he could go for some rakija—but he didn’t want to offer any to Slavko—so he took cover behind the pantry door and poured himself a shot glass. He soon concluded that this was stupid, so he went over to the table and set down his glass. “I’ll have a sip of rakija with mine. I’m not offering because . . . well, I hear you don’t drink.” Then he gestured sharply with his forefinger in the air and said, “And that’s wise!”
The man with the dog looked around with no particular curiosity. As if counting something.
Sobotka drank down half his glass, lit a cigarette, and, with nothing better to do, said, “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m working again.”
He did not say at the factory because he thought that might be the wrong thing to say to Slavko, as if saying at the factory would be like asking, “Where have you been?”
“We’re starting to get some work done, nothing much, it’s mostly for the fun of it,” Sobotka said. “I had this idea, why not clean it up a bit . . . Touch things up . . .”
“Yup,” said Slavko, nodding grimly, looking straight ahead.
Sobotka threw him a look you give someone you’d thought was dead: was this him coming back?
Even before this, Sobotka sometimes mused, Slavko couldn’t be completely mad or he wouldn’t have survived. He knew where he was living. Sobotka knew that during the war Slavko took in refugees, relatives from the village. Sobotka knew that later—after Slavko’s son died when the man lost his grip—those same relatives took over his entire house, and now he lived in a toolshed, a garage, or whatever the little shack was. He didn’t know if they fed him. Guess they must have—they probably decided they wouldn’t kill him; they probably needed him for something. Word on the street was that he’d never signed his property over to them, so they’d have trouble when Slavko died because his daughter was still alive somewhere. There was talk that Slavko’s wife had died, but nobody knew where the daughter was, and there was nobody to ask about her. Slavko had refused to communicate with anyone in any way since his son died, and these relatives of his were not exactly a reliable source.
The water came to a boil and Sobotka brewed the coffee.
He’d given a lot of thought to how to help Slavko, after numerous unsuccessful attempts at approaching him. Those scenes horrified him. He watched Slavko escape while roaring “THIS DOG HAS NO MASTER, HA HA HA!” because Slavko had probably been using noise to keep his demons at bay; at least that’s how it seemed to Sobotka.
A long time ago, in the village where he was from, Sobotka’s grandmother had told him that demons could be chased away with noise. “Just shout! And shout joyfully!” she used to say, wishing to protect her grandson from demons and all manner of evil spirits whose existence she never doubted, having encountered them herself. Sobotka recognized the same exuberant warding off of demons in Slavko whenever he’d tried to approach him. Each time this happened, Sobotka felt the need to get drunk, and he usually succeeded. What to do about Slavko? he’d muse, at a moment when his conscience troubled him, one of many at that time. The only thing he could do, thought Sobotka, was to have him hospitalized. But what would become of him in an asylum, in this society that didn’t even care for the sane? Would that be better than letting him roam free with his dog? He felt Slavko was better off free, out in the open air.
And so Slavko roamed through most of the war, and had his son not died, as everybody knew, someone probably would have gunned him down, maybe as a joke, maybe irritated by his yelling, from which he seemed to be suggesting that his son had killed himself, though the boy—Tren was his name—had died heroically in an attack on enemy positions, as had many, indeed, at the time, so people were jarred by Slavko yelling, “My boy did himself in! Charge-charge!”
Sobotka was there once when a young man said, “I could pick him off right now,” and Sobotka asked, “Who?”
“The yeller. He’s so fucking annoying!”
“He’s not here,” Sobotka told him. “He’s a ghost. Understand?”
“Not here, you say?” The boy threw him a menacing look.
At the time, Sobotka was armed, so when he said, “Whoever touches him is a dead man,” he meant it.
Sobotka set the coffee cup down in front of Slavko.
They were silent for a while, because Sobotka was trying to figure out what to say. He didn’t know a lingo for lunatics.
Finally, he chose to speak. “So . . . little by little, day by day, we’ve cleared up the mess, cleaned . . . I’ve examined the machines, we tweaked a few things here and there. . . . The spare-parts shed roof collapsed, but we cleared that out and I found all sorts of material. So now we’re starting to work, we’re almost set.”
“Yup,” nodded Slavko, his eyes fixed on the dog on the floor, as if he’d already talked this over with it and was asserting that he’d been right—Slavko, not the dog.
“Two guys showed up out of nowhere. Do your thing like back then, they said, build the exact same turbines. . . . One of them, the one who stayed here, he’s acting like he’s the boss. He wants to be asked about things. It’s like he doesn’t want us to forget he’s in charge. But in fact he’s always the one doing the asking. He’s completely clueless. I could give him the runaround tomorrow. But why would I? The paychecks keep coming. You wouldn’t believe it, we have everything neatly organized, we don’t need any outside help.”
“Yup,” said Slavko, nodding again.
Then, tucking his lower lip under the upper one, he looked at Sobotka, like a person who’d taken offense, and then he slowly averted his gaze and stared at a corner of the ceiling.
“Come, too, if you like.”
Slavko shot him a quick glance, then looked at the window. Abruptly he stood.
“Or stop by again for coffee.”
Slavko was already on his way to the door, leaving his cup untouched. The dog, as if stupefied by the heat, rose slowly and trotted after him.
They left without a backward glance.
Sobotka stared as they walked away, until Slavko disappeared around the corner.
He went back to his shaving but was so distracted that all he could do was stare blankly at the mirror for a while. Images flashed through his mind—he and Slavko as young engineers, proving their worth, snapshots
from parties. The Municipality of N. Award Slavko received in 1984, when Sobotka thought perhaps he’d deserved it as well; he figured Slavko was given it was because he, Sobotka, wasn’t politically suitable, otherwise it would have been his.
Ah, the award; at the time he thought all that meant something to him. Yes, he, too, used to be vain, once upon a time, how strange to remember. Then he caught his reflection in the mirror.
He soaped up his face again.
12
THE DINNER WAS complicated, cutting-edge; Lorena’s acquaintances were open to everything new. So open to everything new, in fact, that they were a bit weak on memory. Lorena introduced Oleg as a Viennese entrepreneur, and they all shook hands. For a moment he was going to tell them he remembered them from the old days. But as they showed no signs of recognizing him, he let it go.
He and she arrived late to the culinary festivities, so the animated hosts summarized what they’d prepared, having already provided the other guests, apparently, with a longer disquisition. Oleg made no effort to remember any of it; his eye was caught only by oranges where he wouldn’t have expected to see them. But he did realize all this was fairly important; he’d been noticing how cooking was becoming the cultural medium for a new class. A new bourgeoisie had risen out of the counterculture and asserted itself in the kitchen, he felt, and alternative cuisine was playing a role in fusing the alternative and the bourgeois.
The food was decent; the portions, modest.
He observed them. The host used to be a guitarist in a quirky demo band—did they ever release a record? he couldn’t remember—and now he produced commercials and collaborated with Lorena, or with her company. The guitarist’s wife, well, she was an ex-metalhead and used to be charmingly depressed, but these days—to Oleg’s surprise—she happened to be working in public relations at the same bank where he’d taken out his loan, after only just managing to lose the tennis game and clinch the deal with Ajderovitsch, to whom he’d paid a small commission.
Oleg remembered them from a time when he himself used to be a different person, namely, the late eighties, when they listened to gloomy alt-rock, full of painful resignation, because, as he read somewhere later, it had lost its belief in its own liberating force. Even drugs no longer opened the doors of perception, but instead sucked them in. Theirs wasn’t a joyful youth, they’d left the joy to the country hicks, which surprised him in hindsight: he always remembered his youth as a time of happiness, but that must have been his stereotypical memory. Now, meeting these people, he couldn’t say they’d been happy then. They even longed to be fucked up like Nick Cave—and they were reasonably good at that—and they’d come out on the dance floor for the local hit “You Are All My Pain.” They really did feel all the pain. No longer. As if they’d been anesthetized.
I probably look even more anesthetized than they do, he thought. At first he didn’t say much over dinner, but his brain was busy.
Images flashed through his mind of the cheap rock clubs of his youth, and how his generation hadn’t put up much of a fight when they were shut down. He assumed that, like him, they were in post-socialist shock and, like him, they’d made their peace with it, had become part of the shock, thinking now only about themselves and nothing else. Exactly, just like me, they had to find a new place under the sun.
Cooking seemed to be the only thing they did now. This focus on cooking, he thought, was in some way a continuation of thinking only about yourself, in a more relaxed and sophisticated manner. Still, if I were in their place, I wouldn’t know what else to do, either. He watched this from a distance, because, despite all the shit he was caught up in, or precisely because of it, he lived differently. The fact that Lorena saw him as a kind of bohemian businessman actually made some sense to him.
Undead, undead, undead . . . —was quietly playing in the background.
Lately he had been thinking about what settling down would be like. At moments, this seemed like exactly what he wanted, yet, soaking up the atmosphere at this gathering, he wasn’t so sure.
He couldn’t decide what he really wanted, so maybe this, he thought, was the reason he gambled so much.
He observed this generation of his, who, after all they’d been through, said they were keen to lead a normal life. During the war, as he recalled, they’d developed a nationalist, even radical nationalist, bent and given him a thumbs-up, knowing something of the circles he ran in, but now they seemed to have forgotten all that and realigned as bland urban liberals, at least for the time being, until the next wave hit.
They surfed the waves just as he did, yet somehow differently, he thought, more safely, nearer the shore, whereas he rode waves somewhat farther out to sea, and so they hadn’t seen much of each other over the last fifteen years. This was how they now seemed new. He examined the new images they’d nestled into, and found it interesting to see how the waves were ridden here; just like surfers, each merged with their wave, and within each there was a precursor or two, who proved the authenticity of the path they were on.
The former guitarist was now talking about his great-grandfather who used to be a judge back before the war. But the archives had been torched somewhere in the tri-border area. Because everything there was periodically torched, especially the archives. All that was left were the stories of the fires, joked the former guitarist and current commercials producer, a witty guy, who was, perhaps, the offspring of a family of aristocrats, or of a family of arsonists, thought Oleg on his way out of the bathroom. This is when he finally noticed that the former guitarist was wearing a T-shirt with a print of something or someone resembling Che Guevara—the design was a slightly psychedelic visual game, containing elements of Che’s famous portrait, which is why he didn’t catch on right away.
Lorena wasn’t saying much, either, Oleg noticed, and she was more high-flung in her choice of words than usual when she did talk. She must be distracted, he thought, and her jaw showed a certain clench, possibly from the coke he’d given her.
The wine was good, too.
Apart from the hosts, a newspaper editor and a theater studies scholar were also guests. The newspaper editor kept dropping the names of ambassadors from important countries, making it more than obvious that he rubbed elbows with them, while the academic intimately mentioned a renowned theater director who was working on a production of a piece by one of our greatest writers, about whom the newspaper editor knowingly said that he was in fact “our most bourgeois writer.” His tone, when he said this, was as if he just happened to pick this tidbit up today while at his editorial desk, so he was in the know. In fact, he even added that the renowned director had said as much in an interview which the editor had proofed that very morning, and he himself concurred, as did the drama doctor, who nodded.
Oleg found all of this amusing, or—a better way to say it—he thought it could lead to some amusement. So he asked the experts: didn’t this great writer of ours—apparently, as of today, the most bourgeois—write about the bourgeoisie with a healthy dose of irony, or did Oleg only think so because he was already high on pot when he read him? Now he was worried. Was it possible that Sid Vicious, too, was a bourgeois artist? Because the entire period during which he smoked pot was hazy for him. He couldn’t tell anymore if his memory was playing tricks on him, or had he remembered everything wrong. On the other hand, there was also the possibility that this great writer had written everything just so it would be staged in a lavish production by the national theater and he could show the world that we had a highly civilized culture. Although he wanted to go on, Oleg started laughing.
For some reason, he thought these people would have a sense of humor and only needed to be prodded a bit, but he must have said something off-color, because everybody stopped eating and started squinting at him, as if somebody had taken their picture at a bad moment.
Only a few minutes had passed since he’d come out of the bathroom, and at the peak of his high
he saw them all in sharp focus.
“Hey, I meant that in the most bourgeois possible way,” he said cheerfully, thinking this would lift their spirits.
Still under the influence of the coke he’d given her, Lorena swept her hair off her neck and then jumped in as if about to sweep everything under the rug, saying, “You know, Oleg is an entrepreneur currently renovating a factory and he’s granted autonomy to the workers. It’s almost like workers’ self-management, heh-heh. . . . Until you get to know him, please, don’t take him too seriously!” She laughed as if with this she’d solved everything.
Oleg knew she only meant to brighten the mood, and she actually did: everybody stared at him like he was a freak, and he shook his head in a silly way and everything went slightly askew. Fine. But though he’d told her his past and future businesses were not for public consumption, she’d mentioned the factory, which she shouldn’t have under any circumstances. Didn’t she know the factory was a risky venture? Or was this her subconscious speaking, because something was bothering her? In any case, he set out to distract them. Before the dinner, he’d asked Lorena how they felt about cocaine. She knew the former guitarist was fine with it, as was the newspaper editor and probably the academic as well. But she didn’t know about the evening’s hostess, because obviously, as far as he could tell, Lorena knew the husband better than the wife. Since arriving Oleg had been sensing some strain between Lorena and the hostess, and he noticed that when touching him Lorena was sending the signal that she and Oleg were a couple, which helped the hostess relax. He also observed the former guitarist. Every time Lorena touched Oleg, the host looked away; he was noticeably absent. I’ll think about this later, if I don’t forget, thought Oleg. However, most important now was to take the quantum leap, but before he did, he needed to identify the hostess’s position on coke, which is why he asked in a clownish manner, “Miss Vlatka, if I told you I was under the influence of strong drugs, would you hold that against me or for me?”
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