The bartender glanced over at them and then acted again as if they weren’t there.
Then, more quietly, she said “Look—no matter what we are, I don’t have to answer to you.”
“I just asked one thing.”
“You really don’t give up,” she said, wondering why she was still sitting there. Hadn’t she just told him she’d leave?
“It’s important to me. I just need to know what you do.”
“Well you can’t! Not like this. No! Not now! It’s like you suddenly became a different person,” she said, withdrawing deeper into her chair.
“I’m a different person? You can’t tell me what you do for a living. Who’s a different person?”
She wondered what kept her from walking out. The fact that she’d already formed a picture of him in her mind, a completely different picture, and the picture still had a hold on her? She gave him a long look, as if this were the last thing she was going to say.
“Look . . . I organize some things for them in the field. Technical. Okay?”
And what do they do, those you do the organizing for? He wanted to know, but he obviously wasn’t going to find out.
“If I hadn’t seen you with that American guy, you would’ve continued talking about it as outsourcing and stuff, right?”
He really is acting like a cop, thought Šeila.
“That’s what I said, ‘outsourcing’ . . . That’s what it is. I’m not a regular employee.”
Yeah, I bet they formally hired you at the CIA, he thought. Then he asked himself—Wait, is this paranoia? I must be paranoid. . . . She can’t be an agent, can she? But then he thought about how they’d met. Whose initiative was that? Hmm, she showed up at the Blue Lagoon, Erol and Branoš were hitting on her, and then a couple of days later she was sitting there alone. She went to my place that same night. . . . She even initiated the sex. . . . Could it be? I’ve made an idiot of myself again. . . . No, no, can’t be.
He fell silent, ate his meat, and she thought he’d somehow taken what she’d been saying on board. But the conversation, the restaurant with the stuffed deer head on the wall—like the one time in Tbilisi, everything assumed a somber tone.
Nikola was now thinking about something else: Where did the journalist even come from? Was Oleg the one who messed up, or was he, Nikola, the patsy?
“That—what you do . . . This information, you must understand, it’s really necessary for me,” he said while leaning toward her, knife and fork in hand. He said this in a voice that sounded to her as if it were trembling with a strange fever.
She studied him a bit more as he leaned over the table like that, and thought he might be insane. Then she shuddered, remembering how he’d been convinced that his ex was carrying his child. She got up without a word, fearing he might come after her.
He didn’t—she saw when she looked around—he remained seated, with his silverware in his hands and his mouth slightly agape like a person who’d suddenly died.
• • •
The article was published with the title “Self-Management Beyond Seven Mountains”—and now the journalist’s purpose was clear to Sobotka. He’d already known that the people living beyond seven mountains in a godforsaken place were funny and ridiculous, like dwarves who sang as they worked. Nice people, generally, but in one part, right before the end, the article became serious, creating the impression that these workers were not just reviving self-management in their own spontaneous, idiosyncratic way, but were taking it a step further by reading Engels, though they’d been reluctant to talk about this. One of them had blurted something and then fell silent after exchanging glances with a stern leader, a certain engineer named Sobotka, who was of course an opponent of free speech and even tried to give the journalist lectures in politics (“That is when everything stopped being funny”), which he, the journalist, managed successfully to resist, because he was in fact apolitical—and to him this had been an interesting experience of “a confrontation with atavism in a remote town where time stood still.” In addition, the journalist, Miho was his name, casually pointed out that he’d experienced other pressures regarding this article. Is he referring to the editor, my new buddy, wondered Oleg while reading. At that point he noticed that there was no mention of him. Had the editor left that out like a real buddy, or did he just realize that the story about Oleg was unbelievable?
At the same time, Sobotka, reading aloud, said in front of the other workers, “Look, they pressured him. He’s probably already in Siberia!”
People laughed, although some didn’t quite understand all of it.
One man said, “Just so we’re clear, I don’t read those books. You asked me to come and I’m working. . . . I don’t know what you’re up to.”
“Well, we’re planning a coup d’état, don’t you see?” Sobotka said. The guy gaped at him. Sobotka added, “Any day now we’ll be in power.”
“He’s just fucking with you, man,” Erol said to the man, who was on his crew.
“And what are the newspapers saying?” said the man defensively.
“They are saying what they want. I was the one who said the thing about Engels,” said Erol. “I really am a fool.”
“Don’t you be calling me a fool,” said the man. “Just so you know. I am no Communist.”
After that word there was, as usual, a brief hush.
“Hmm . . . Should we exclude him from the Party?” said Sobotka, winking at Erol.
“I’m not in any kind of party,” shouted the man, whose name was Ćamil.
Sobotka looked at him and thought, and this is who I’m working with.
Another one, however, raised his hand and said, “By God! I’m for exclusion!”
• • •
“It’s all good,” said Oleg in his bathrobe after he’d showered and was recovering from his hangover; he flicked his wet hair and both his eyes were red, probably from the stupid shampoo.
“Look,” he said to Nikola on the phone, “it turned out well considering how things could have gone. . . . What matters is they didn’t mention you-know-what. What matters is they don’t look in that direction, and I don’t give a fuck about the ideology, let them mock and laugh. That’s their democratic right.”
“Sure, fine, I agree, but the workers are upset. They’re pissed off. It’s kind of a different situation here. You should come. They might really organize themselves into something—I don’t know what,” said Nikola, using the situation, because he wanted Oleg there. He was feeling depressed again after what had happened with Šeila.
“Them? What could they do?”
“I don’t know, all of this is so strange. They’ve realized now that the public is not on their side, it’s like they’ve seen that they’re on their own and no one has their back.”
“Well, tell them we have their back,” said Oleg, bothered.
“What do you mean, ‘we’?”
“I intervened, man. I take shit every night from some pretty fucked-up motherfuckers.”
“Yes, but the workers have forgotten about you. You are like an enigma to them. You should come here, let the people get a sense of you.”
“Damn, better not.”
16
THE IMAGE OF the man she was falling in love with had evaporated. He wasn’t who she’d thought he was. In the beginning you imagine the man, and the man imagines the woman. The images fall in love with each other, the images make love and only argue when they bump into the fissures of reality.
The desire for the image comes from the entire body: sex desires beauty; yes, sex desires beauty; sex without beauty is a failure of human illusion. Because sex desires beauty—those who fall in love are artists at that moment, a moment which is the very essence of the human desire for the illusion with which they are copulating. This is why everyone knows what art is, and what poetry is, and what painti
ng is: they are all the same. Everyone knows that, even when they despise it, when they despise infatuation and art, and that’s most of the time.
This time, the image needed to be discarded, it had collapsed. Maybe better that this happened now, at the beginning, rather than later when she would’ve been so used to the illusion of him that she wouldn’t be able to discard it so easily. She’d try to patch up the image. Yes, it’s better this way, she thought.
Still, she had just begun to fall in love—Oh, don’t make less of it, she thought. I’ve already fallen in love. That’s why this is rocking me like an early, terribly early, morning wakening after a night of drinking. All the desires of the body are on the other side, and any wakening simply hurts. You put your head back on the pillow and something from the outside is rocking you again, shouting from reality, the reality itself is shouting, poking into the dream. No, let me sleep! Let me dream! Why couldn’t you leave me alone?
She was angry, thinking about everything. She was angry because she didn’t understand the seam, the crack in the image: What had actually happened? Was this mere jealousy? A yen for power? He didn’t seem the type. How could she have been so wrong? Was it possible that he was unhinged? Why did he need to know what she did? Nobody was supposed to know; she’d promised.
But yes, she might have told him if he hadn’t been so obsessive about it. Goddammit, why? She wouldn’t have been so obsessive. A woman would never be so obsessive. Many women barely know what their husbands do, but she can get over it, to her this can feel normal; it can even be sexy—the ignorance, the opacity, the secrecy. But to him, this was an insurmountable problem; he couldn’t bear not knowing everything about her.
What a stupid illusion, she thought, to know everything!
They want to know everything because they know nothing about women. That explains the panic.
Like you’re a secret agent, he’d said. A woman whose job is opaque to a man, a woman he doesn’t control, is instantly a Mata Hari, a security threat. This rude awakening hurt.
With Michael she’d felt like a trinket, and that killed their relationship; she’d sworn then that she wouldn’t do that again. She wanted to have her own life, she’d fought her way through these backwaters, but there simply were no more men for her, there’d been none for a long time, and then one showed up, and soon after that, he burst like a balloon.
They were driving on a heavily rutted road up a hill, Šeila, Lauš, and Alex, clumsy Alex, the American who’d caused her relationship with Nikola to burst.
The road looked like it was leading them away from the world, and that suited her fine. It felt good to gaze at all the greenery in this little valley between the mountain peaks. These paths could only be traveled starting in late spring.
But the path, which more or less resembled a road, was now narrowing and disappearing. The SUV with huge tires they’d rented could pass through all kinds of trackless countryside, but now there was simply no more space.
They climbed out of the car.
“The pass is up here, we’ll have to go on foot,” said Old Lauš.
He was Šeila’s distant cousin, and she’d brought him along as their guide.
They set off with backpacks. They left some of their equipment in the SUV. If everything went according to plan they’d return for the rest of their things the next day.
They walked for a long time, making their way through the pass to a sunlit plateau on which there were scattered a dozen stone monoliths.
Alex walked through the grass and started to examine them and run his hands over them. Some were in the shape of little roofed dwellings and ornaments carved in the stone.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Large stone suitcases.”
“You’re joking.”
“They’re tombstones,” said Šeila. Alex flinched, as if he were unsure of where next to tread, so she went on to say: “Don’t worry, they’ve stood here for centuries.”
“Hmm . . . I’ve never seen graves like these.”
“They can only be found here, for a radius of a few hundred miles. Thousands of them.”
Alex looked around, lost in thought, and proceeded to sit down in the grass, as if he’d forgotten he had company.
All right then, this is a nice place to rest, thought Šeila.
She lay down on the grass.
A brisk breeze and quiet sunlight on her skin.
They’d chosen a good spot, she thought.
Colorful imagery behind closed eyelids.
She imagined death now as a pleasant experience and the thought made her open her eyes.
• • •
Half an hour later the village came into view. Dwellings of stone and wood blended with the landscape so you could barely make them out; they were cut into the rock that was towering over the small village almost like a cave opening toward the sun. Was anyone still living there? Mists lay above the village like an army that could descend at any moment.
As they approached the village, a long-haired yellowish dog appeared in front of Šeila, barking loudly.
Another dog they couldn’t see barked back.
They stopped, and the dog eyed them.
It was the village where her grandmother, Drita, was born. She knew some vague stories about her family and this place: this area had been their summer pastures and, once, during a war that thundered through the valleys, they chose to stay here. In her childhood she hadn’t been interested in what her grandmother was saying. No one cared about it, and Grandma didn’t talk much. But Šeila had listened enough to know one important thing.
She’d told Michael about it.
When he recently called her, the voice she heard wasn’t the old Michael’s anymore, he reminded her of what she’d told him about the village.
“I’m sorry I never called,” said the new Michael. “It just turned out that way. . . . You know . . . I’m calling you now because . . . I’m onto something new. I remember, it is etched in my memory, how you mentioned that there were no bald people in the village your grandmother comes from.”
Šeila laughed, realizing that the Yank, who she thought had forgotten her, remembered her genetic predispositions.
Back then he must have been thinking about them having children after all.
“Did I really tell you about that?” she said, laughter rippling through her instead of sadness. Yes, she’d often imagined a conversation with Michael back in those days, but he never called, nor did he respond to the few calls she made, and by now, by the time he finally did call, everything she’d wanted to tell him had evaporated, as well as what she thought he’d say—because she’d imagined so many versions of the conversation.
But her versions had been serious, not like this.
“You see, I did everything to win you over,” she said to Michael.
“Wait, did you make that up?”
“C’mon, tell me, please, did you like that, picturing your sons protected from baldness because your wife had such unique genes?”
“Well . . . maybe.”
She laughed again. “This conversation is terrific.”
“Don’t hang up now,” Michael said. “Seriously—did you make that up? This is important.”
“Important? That?”
“Oh, fuck . . . okay! Things didn’t work out between us. You know that. What was the point. I was supposed to call and say what you already knew?”
She was silent for a time, and then she said, “I didn’t make it up. My grandma used to say there were no bald people in her village. She saw a bald man for the first time when she came down into the valley. The baldness took her by surprise, I don’t know, like seeing a black man for the first time. . . . Sorry, Michael. It completely slipped my mind that you’re black. . . . It’s amazing, the things a person forgets.”
“Sheila .
. . I’m sorry if this call upsets you. Do you want me to call tomorrow?”
“No, no, everything’s fine. I’m just . . . uninhibited . . . I speak what comes to mind, see? We know each other; I can speak freely, right?”
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll stick to the point. Do you think the story about the village is true? Have you been there?”
“Only once, as a child. It’s way up there. My father was born in the valley.”
“Do you believe it’s true?”
“I don’t know. Wait. Yes. I did believe Grandma.”
“Why?”
“She would always open her eyes wide when she came to that part in the story, when she saw a bald man for the first time. What had happened to him? That’s how she told it. Convincingly. That amused me, so she repeated it.”
“And in your family, are there any bald people?”
She pondered for a moment before saying, “As far as I know, no. Tell me, what’s this about?”
“Biotech. You know, there are some people who would like to look into this.”
“Really?”
“You could be their fixer and a guide for a researcher, maybe even a whole team.”
“You’re offering me a job?”
“Yes.”
“How nice, thank you. . . . I am broke.”
“But don’t think like that. Charge for it. Not by your rates but ours.”
The advice was unexpected. It was as if Michael were speaking as his old self, the self she’d once loved.
“Also, you should get a small percentage in the project, if it comes to something. It probably won’t, but if it does, that would be huge.”
“Oh yeah?”
“These are serious matters.”
What a conversation, she thought, before saying, “I don’t even have a lawyer, Michael. How am I supposed to negotiate?”
“My lawyer will take care of your contract. Do you trust me?”
She paused for a moment, thinking, What else can I do? And then she said, “I will trust you on this.”
No-Signal Area Page 22
