“One kid, Erol, is in charge of defense. He’ll look after you whenever necessary.”
“And I thought I’d have to organize this, but you beat me to the punch,” smiled Oleg. “Still, do you need more people at the factory?”
“Well, ten to fifteen more wouldn’t hurt.”
“Fifteen. We’ll put out an ad right away.”
When Sobotka left, Oleg told Nikola, “It’s not that I mind, but it seems as if we’re unnecessary here.”
“Look, I told you over the phone”, said Nikola. “Stop them if you want.”
Oleg thought for a bit, and then said, “It’s easier this way.”
“Self-organizing,” said Nikola.
“Right.”
“You thought this would be a joke?”
Well it is, thought Oleg, but he kept that to himself. Instead, he said, “Got any hard stuff? Beer sometimes makes me depressed.”
“Only Jäger.”
• • •
Although he didn’t know why, the last conversation he’d had with Veber played back in Sobotka’s head as he walked home, about the time he pulled the old man out of a makeshift prison during the war. Veber had been held there for no reason, which was worse than actually being arrested. If Sobotka hadn’t heard about it, those young men might have executed him purely out of spite, as an old Commie. But they released him after Sobotka pulled rank and they saw he was with two others.
Emaciated and limping, the old man invited him home for a drink. As they were coming in, Sobotka noticed bullet holes in the walls, although the house was far away from the front.
“Who did this?” he asked.
“I don’t know them. Young. Probably thought I screwed up their lives.”
They entered the cold house.
“You probably thought the same once, too,” said Veber. “The strike leader sticking up for the old director, who’d have thought, eh?”
“I had nothing against you. It was the times.”
“You don’t have a mustache like that Pole anymore—fed up?”
“Are you pulling my leg?”
“Laughing is all we’ve got left. I was serious my entire life, but there’s no reason for this anymore. I’m a wanderer like our Slavko, just in a different way.”
Veber then added that his son, luckily, had left ages ago. “He couldn’t bear being in my shadow,” as he put it, and Veber’s wife ended up with his son when the war started. “She’s there now, so we’ll die apart,” he said.
“My family left, too,” said Sobotka.
“Ha, me and Wałęsa. . . . We’ve stayed to ponder.”
It was odd for Sobotka to see Veber laugh. He was a completely different man. Without the status that had been an integral part of his persona, he was just a man from a bygone time.
But his eyes were more alive, intimate, without the shadow he used to have in his gaze, the shadow of everything he represented. It was as if for all those years his gaze was not his own, but the gaze of what he represented. Sobotka thought he’d known this man, but now someone different was before him, as if the snow had melted away, and the sun was scorching his bare head.
Am I like that as well? Sobotka asked himself. I’m without what I was before as well—naked—maybe that’s why the old man is laughing at me.
Veber took out a bottle of cognac, unopened, because, as he said, he never drank alone.
Sobotka then took out a bag and started to roll a joint. Veber asked, “What in the world is that?”
“Pot, Comrade Director,” said Sobotka.
“You’ve started doing drugs, Wałęsa?”
“The younger guys give it to me. It relieves stress. They grow it.”
“What sort of a war are you waging!” declared Veber. “We were more serious once.”
“Revolutionaries. Not that you’ve laughed much since.”
“True,” said the old man, “I missed my chance. Can’t make up for that now.”
“That’s life.”
“Can you believe,” said the old man, “that for some twenty-odd years I didn’t drink? Not a drop. Hey, twenty years. Sober as a church mouse. How to make up for that? You can’t! You can’t make up for that!”
Sobotka laughed while smoking the joint. “That’s what you think about?”
“A man would live differently if he knew the future. Especially if he knew there was no future. In the times when I had a reason, I wasn’t happy. I was a sourpuss, worrying about things that might go wrong, as if I could prevent that by keeping a straight face.”
“You’re not happy with what you did?”
“I was a soldier of life. I could have done all that without being a soldier of life. I had some valid excuses, excuses that would allow me to withdraw into myself, to disappear into the system, to stop existing.”
“I thought we were going to talk about politics. About what’s happening now.”
“Well, this here is not politics, it’s just a mess. When you were on strike, it had already become a mess. We could do nothing more, and you had no politics of your own. Do you remember, Wałęsa?”
“We had nowhere to go.”
“You had no politics. Then along came these things—nation and religion, but that’s also not politics, man. How can it be politics if it’s given to you by birth? That’s biology.”
“I guess I don’t understand politics.”
“Bah, this has nothing to do with politics!”
“You still think you were right?”
“I’m not saying who’s right or not. But we’re the ones who industrialized this country. It used to be a wasteland. And it will be one again.”
“What about political freedom? How were we ever supposed to become something when you treated us like children? You can’t do this, you can’t do that—”
“Well, fuck it, we didn’t know any better. We gave the people some freedom, more than any other socialist system ever did, but you’re right. I still have no idea what we were supposed to do, but something should’ve been done differently. This way, you were completely gullible, like children. Living in a bubble. Then you go outside and believe anything any bastard says. They fuck you from behind like an idiot.”
Sobotka laughed. Before the war, he’d never tried weed and would never have thought this possible—he was high and talking to Veber, who also seemed relaxed in his own way.
“Have you ever tried weed, Director?”
The old man shook his head and carried on, saying, “My Wałęsa, it’s not so much that you saved me, it’s that, as I see it, you’re the only one left. Well done, you did it again—you’ve given me something to think about. You didn’t want to join the Party, I remember that, and there were so many who were willing to. What did we do to lose you?”
“It’s because you guys couldn’t call strikes.”
“You were right to call the strike. Just so you know.”
“I’m an engineer, Director. It’s all over now. When the war ends, I’ll leave.”
“I’ll leave, and you’ll stay,” said Veber.
A few months later Sobotka attended the old man’s very, very modest funeral.
• • •
Dear Nedra,
I’ve been thinking about what to do for a long time now. First of all, I would like to apologize for reading your letters addressed to my friend Slavko. It was a matter of circumstance, since he is not able to read. And since he is living with me, I’ve been taking the mail delivered to him. Trust me, it was impossible for him to read the letters, because psychologically he is in a very peculiar state and was in even worse shape before. He walked around town for years with his dog, never communicating with anyone, not even with me. People thought he was crazy, which is sort of true.
I know you are angry at him, and you think he is selfish and t
hat he didn’t think about you at all. Maybe it was selfish of him to lose his mind, but he had no other way out. He is much better now, but still in his own world. He built a wall and only allows a few things in. I will try and talk to him about you when I see him doing better. I don’t know if that brings you any comfort or what it will mean to you. I couldn’t show him your letters or talk to him about them, because they are not fit for those purposes. I’m not saying you should do this or that or anything, it’s just that if you could send a letter that’s more normal, or maybe a postcard, it would be easier for me to show him something like that. I don’t know if he is the one you need, because he isn’t someone who would be able to behave like a father should. If anything, he is more the one who needs taking care of. Yes, he has started to work at the factory again, and he is doing all sorts of things. He cleans up after himself and everything, but I still can’t tell what exactly is going on in his mind. He’s been living at my place for a while, and some cousins of yours are at his house, cousins who have not been kind to him and took over the whole house for themselves. I’m writing you this so you know of the situation, because that house is yours, too, and you are, except him, the sole heir. In one of your letters, you wrote that you have nothing, so, you see, that’s not the case after all. Maybe it is not worth much in terms of money, but still, the house exists. Keep this in mind.
That’s all from me.
Sincerely,
Sobotka
21
THEY WERE SITTING at the bar in the Blue Lagoon. Branoš was telling Sobotka a story but then realized his companion was paying no attention. Sobotka was smiling dreamily, nodding and drinking. He seemed like he was gazing into himself with an odd glow, like a poignant child.
Nikola also noticed this and whispered to Branoš, “What’s up with him?”
Branoš shrugged, turned toward Sobotka, and said, for the sake of saying something, “This rakija of his is not bad.”
He was referring to the homemade plum brandy that the owner, Rafo, had been bragging about, calling it his weekend special. Sobotka only nodded in return.
Rafo was bragging about the marketing strategies he’d learned in Germany.
“You always have to have an Angebot, a special offer,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s right, nothing without an Angebot.”
“No. Without an Angebot, you’re an amateur. I see them, opening bars and—”
At that moment, Sobotka exclaimed, “A round for everyone. On me!”
“You celebrating?” Nikola said.
“Yes!” said Sobotka sharply.
He did not feel like explaining that he’d become a grandfather. This was sort of an odd thing for him to say out loud. Or it just seemed that it meant he would then have to tell a really long story.
Earlier, Viktoria had sent him a text: “Another girl in the family. Jasmina is doing well. We’ve been swimming, although the sea’s still cold. But we’re used to it. Christina sends her regards.”
This Christina kept sending her regards, which confused him, but he decided not to dwell on it.
He called Jasmina’s cell. She didn’t pick up. He thought she must have been exhausted from the birthing so he sent her a congratulatory text.
He had just received an answer: “Thank you. Jasmina.”
Before the text’s arrival, it felt hypocritical to celebrate, as if he’d be celebrating something he was only imagining was his to celebrate, something that didn’t acknowledge him as being a part of it. You can’t have a granddaughter if you don’t have a daughter, he’d thought. But now it felt right for him to buy everyone drinks.
He clinked glasses with Nikola, Branoš, Oleg, Lipša, Erol—everyone within reach.
“Friends, I’m happy! If I die tomorrow, I will die a happy man!” he said, without explanation.
“C’mon, stop fucking around!” Oleg said. “You can’t die tomorrow. That’s not what the plan says.”
They toasted.
Everybody loved Oleg, maybe even more than they loved Nikola. Perhaps because he drank with more fervor and eloquence. He kept buying everyone drinks and every day was like a holiday with him, so much so that Nikola had to keep prodding him to cool it.
The previous night, back at their apartment, Nikola had said, “You can’t keep getting them drunk, they have to work tomorrow.”
“But they do work. Even harder than we deserve.”
“Okay, but don’t say that in front of them. They’ll start slacking off.”
“Ha ha. Them, slacking off? They’re working as if they were the owners. I was right, wasn’t I?” said Oleg drunkenly. “The country’s in crisis, yet we’re working. You have to celebrate that!”
“Yes, yes,” said Nikola quietly. “But we mustn’t mess things up now with all this drinking.”
“Too bad I can’t give them everything,” Oleg whispered, as if bad luck were preventing him from doing so. “But I’m going to, someday.”
“What are you going to give them?”
“Everything!” said Oleg drunkenly. “You’ve seen how much they love me. And I don’t deserve it at all. . . . Fuck.”
“You know,” Nikola said, looking at Oleg, “sometimes I really don’t get you.”
“Like that would be of much use to you.”
People thought of Oleg as a bit mysterious, a well-respected oddball, and Nikola was concerned about him. At times he appeared to be bright and cheerful, his eyes shining as if there was no tomorrow, and then he would look as if there were something chasing after him.
In any case, Oleg had completely disregarded his instructions about “moderate intimacy” and “keeping a polite distance.” When Nikola warned him, which happened mostly when he was already drunk, Oleg answered, “The organizer reserves the right to make changes to the event program.”
Now, talking loudly so the whole bar could hear, Oleg declared, “We’re drinking, but we’re not slacking off!”
The drinks Sobotka had bought were now in everyone’s hands. At least the weekend began tomorrow. Nikola didn’t care. Let them drink.
Then Nikola noticed Šeila come in. She was not alone. There was a man with her, and Nikola knew right away that this was the same guy, the American.
Sobotka also noticed Šeila and started to wave to her as if seeing a member of his own family. She seemed hesitant for a moment, because she’d noticed Nikola, but then she came over.
“Šeila!” Sobotka said. “It’s as if you knew!”
“What?” she said.
“Our Jasmina had a baby today!”
Sobotka hugged her as if she were Jasmina, or at least his connection to Jasmina. She suddenly found herself in the center of all his joy. She was also glad to hear this news from afar, this virtual bond with the past.
“What are you having, Šeila? You and your friend,” asked Sobotka.
Šeila explained to Alex that this was the father of her childhood best friend, and her friend now lived far away and had just had a baby.
Alex congratulated Sobotka and Sobotka realized he had to announce the news to everyone else as well. “Hey everyone, I’m a grandfather!”
“Wow!” shouted Oleg, clinking glasses with Sobotka again, then with the American and with Šeila.
Nikola was looking at Šeila over Sobotka’s back. She nodded to him.
Oleg said to Alex, “And who are you, my friend?”
“Don’t understand,” he responded in English.
“Oleg. Nice to meet you,” said Oleg, also in English.
“Alex. Glad to meet you, too.”
“We’re having a party tonight, so you should be prepared for anything.”
“I see,” Alex said with a laugh.
Then Oleg went over to Nikola.
“This guy’s American,” he said as if he’d sobered up a bit.
“I know,” said Nikola.
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“What is a Yank doing here?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Well, shit,” said Oleg. “We’ll have to get him drunk and find out.”
“You think?”
“If I can’t get him drunk, that means we have a problem.”
Nikola wanted to give him more information, but Oleg was already standing next to Alex, raising his glass.
Šeila walked over to Nikola.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he said.
He looked as if he were still upset. She said, “So you still can’t get over not knowing what I do for a living?”
Nikola dropped his head. He knew she was out to provoke him, but he couldn’t gauge how much. If the Yank was here to keep an eye on him and Oleg, Šeila was being really provocative.
“Well, you know, sort of,” he said.
“That’s just unbelievable!” she said bitterly, as if continuing an old family fight.
Standing at the bar, he rested his forehead on his index finger and thumb, and started moving them around as if massaging. What was he supposed to answer? Until he found out what her job was, he didn’t know what answer he was supposed to give. If he told her that, she’d go crazy. And she’d think he was crazy. Dammit, just say what you’re doing with the American! The words hovered on the tip of his tongue.
“You find it unbelievable. I don’t. We obviously don’t understand each other.”
“But why?”
Because we are making goddamn turbines for a country under international embargo, for the enemies of America, and you’re here with a Yank, and they don’t come here on vacation. That’s what he thought about saying to her. It would have been lovely if he’d blurted it out before discovering what she was up to with this American guy. He was getting really fucking furious as he thought about this.
“You don’t trust me,” he said. “There are certain things you don’t want to tell me. Okay.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“It’s unbelievable how you just cut through everything,” she said, shaking her head.
No-Signal Area Page 26
