We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day

by Ivana Bodrozic

  Then she returned to the city, single mother, by then, of Dejan Vujanović—later Kristina’s student in the junior class of the high school where she taught—a tall, bright-eyed boy who sat near the back of the room. When he was assigned an open-ended essay, he wrote about the poems of Delimir Rešicki for his Croatian language class, and about Branko Miljković’s poems for his Serbian class. A boy who mostly smoked by himself on the school grounds, absorbed in his music and poetry; he organized interviews for the school paper and drew wry comic strips. He listened attentively to Kristina in class and gave her that rare pleasure in teaching she’d found now and then among junior-year students, which made up for all the dimwits who were waiting only for the next soccer game so they could brawl. Little Dejo was Kristina’s neighbor in her apartment building, and she still remembered him from when he was a child, when she and Ante first moved back to the city. He never made trouble. Once, long before, a few years back, she heard him through her open window when he was playing with the other children on the street, and she’d never forget it. He was about ten, living in a neighborhood where there were very few other Serbian kids, and he called out: “Whoever wants to be on my team, raise three fingers”—and then he added, in a singsong voice, “or two . . .”. This moment of his sensitivity to the fact that Serbian kids responded by raising three fingers while Croatian kids raised two was something that would have been almost impossible to explain to anybody, especially anyone who wasn’t from the city. Every so often his mother would pick on someone and harass them, and now Kristina’s turn had come. And all because of that thoughtless comment she’d posted to Facebook about the Thompson concert. She wasn’t even a fan; Thompson was no Bruce Springsteen, but Ante was the spokesperson for the veterans on the city council and he had tickets for VIP seats, so she was going. Though this seemed pointless to her, especially now, when one group was putting up signs in Serbian Cyrillic all over town and another group was tearing them down.

  3.

  Moving toward

  they say

  they don’t recognize me

  now (fall 2010)

  Her first interviewee that morning lived on Švapsko Hill, along Republike Austrije Street. She hadn’t made an appointment; it was more effective to show up unannounced. Despite everything being nearby, Nora hadn’t made sense of what the receptionist-in-training explained to her on the map with its tangle of one-way streets. “Go straight, and at Kruna Mesara turn right,” he said, but Nora was bad at following maps. She was never entirely sure where she was, where she was walking from, where she was going; in short, her position in her mind and her position on the outside did not necessarily coincide. She realized she could easily waste the entire morning, so off she went to the bus station, close by, hoping to find a cab. She spotted an Opel Corsa in a parking lot along the way, but when she got to the terminal, there were no cabs. Just as she’d made her peace with setting out on foot and stopping someone every so often to check if she was going in the direction of Kruna Mesara, the cab driver from the night before stepped out of a small store. Nora was the one, now, who walked up to him. He gave no sign that he’d ever seen her before. She stood in his path.

  “Taxi?” she asked with a wary smile.

  This threw him off. He looked at her, surprised, and then, as if only then recalling that he drove a cab, he said:

  “I’m not driving just now, sorry; I’m busy, in something of a rush.”

  “But last night you were here. You offered me a ride, remember?” Nora wasn’t backing down. She was surprised he didn’t remember. What else was going on? The night before, he’d really wanted to be a cab driver. Nora didn’t think of herself as a particularly memorable person, but she didn’t expect to be so completely ignored. At thirty she could still pass as a student. She was one of those women who didn’t stand out right away, with her midlength light hair tied back, usually, in a careless twist, always in slim jeans and dark tops. She was built like a boy, with a symmetrical face, an olive-hued complexion, and ever-so-slightly slanted eyes. But if a person looked at her more closely, her face was not easily forgotten. When she gave a heartfelt laugh, which was rare, she warmed up the room. When she listened closely to the person she was talking to, her eyes drinking in every gesture and the hue of the conversation, the person had to look away. Too intense. Perhaps because she seldom approached anything superficially, except the things she preferred to forget.

  “Just one ride?” she pleaded.

  “Okay, but where? As long as it’s not too far . . .”

  “Švapsko Hill, Republike Austrije Street, near the Kruna—”

  “Mesara, I know; that’s not ten minutes from here.”

  “I know, but as I’m not familiar . . .”

  “Okay, off we go, but you’ll have to make your way back on your own.”

  “No problem, I’m sure I’ll manage.”

  The cab driver unlocked the doors. The inside of the old car was spotless. And she noticed there were no insignia hanging from the rearview mirror, or anywhere else on display—no rosaries, coats of arms, declaring allegiance to one side or the other. There were not even any stickers suggesting who the driver’s favorite soccer team was, only a little green tree-shaped air freshener that gave off a penetrating scent of green apple. She hadn’t seen a cassette player in a car for years; as they started off, the driver switched it on. There were speakers only in front, barely audible over the rumble of the motor, but despite all the noise she still recognized the voice of Johnny Štulić, and the words tvoje ruke u neskladu, “your hands in discord” . . . Music like this always sent her spinning back in time; those singers and beats were from a different era—song lyrics people seldom listened to anymore, yet the words said so much. About a time that was lived, a time now so far away that whatever was left of life was forever catching up. When they set off, she remembered there was another meeting to schedule, this one with Kristina’s former principal, whom she’d called the night before. She’d been promised an interview today. The principal interested her because a recording had been made public a few weeks before of the mayor trying to bribe the woman, but, to Nora’s regret, a colleague, not she, had been assigned that story. Though she didn’t ask him to, when she took her cell phone from her purse the cab driver turned the volume down without looking at her, and this gave her an instant to study his profile. He had a largish nose, attractive, sharp.

  “Hello?” said the voice over the phone.

  “Hello, forgive me, am I speaking to Ms. Arsovska?”

  “Yes, who’s this?”

  “Nora Kirin here, from Vrijeme. I wrote to you last week. Calling about this afternoon? A half hour is all I need, a brief conversation . . . I know others have called you, but I won’t be much of a bother. It’s about Kristina, a teacher at your school . . .”

  “Listen, I’ve said all there is to say about her, and I have a very full schedule. It’s a tragic story; I regret that I have nothing to add.”

  “I won’t mention you by name. But I do need to clarify a few points.”

  “You won’t mention me by name? The media has been besieging me recently . . .”

  “I won’t, I promise; it’s about Kristina.”

  “Okay, fine, but just half an hour. Hotel Lav; I’ll get back to you about the time.”

  “Thank you. Looking forward.”

  She was glad to think she’d be done with her interviews by evening and would be able to catch the last bus for Zagreb, or the first one out the next morning, and get away from here.

  “Thirteen?” The taxi slowed.

  “Let me check.” Nora glanced at her pad. “Yes, thirteen.” She looked over at him. “How did you know? I didn’t give you the number.”

  He pulled up in front of a small gray house, identical to all the other houses all down the block, the only difference being the house number. Once a city has been ravaged and leveled, no
thing can bring it back to life. Even with vast effort, neighborhoods that used to have a special feel now looked more like an artificial arm or leg, a prosthetic limb of brick, concrete, and iron. He turned to her and said:

  “I heard you were taking about Kristina, the teacher. This is a small city, and everyone knows everybody else. Ante’s mother lives here, and I doubt she’ll open the door for you. But, hey, go for it.”

  Nodding, Nora got out of the cab. Everything he was saying made sense.

  “Thanks; still, I’ll try.” Just then she remembered she hadn’t paid him, nor had he asked her for money, and she began rummaging through her purse.

  “No problem,” he said, “my meter’s broken.”

  “Gee, really? Thanks . . .”

  She stepped away from the car and walked toward the front gate. The Corsa turned, and then the driver rolled down the window.

  “Nora!” He called her by name. “Take care.”

  This struck her as odd. He didn’t give her the impression of being an overly courteous man, though she liked the quip about the meter; apparently he was observant.

  She didn’t see a doorbell by the door. There was a button to the right on the doorframe, but no name on it. She decided to try. When she pressed it, she heard the harsh buzz of the bell, and then, a half minute later, the shuffle of feet across the floor. From the dark belly of the front hall came a snow-white head, a foot or so below her eye level. The old woman looked up at Nora.

  “Who are you?” she asked in a rasping voice, with no greeting.

  “Forgive me for disturbing you.” She hadn’t been prepared for this. “I am a journalist, Nora Kirin; I would like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “What do you want? Don’t come trampling on the dead bones of my Ante,” the old woman said tartly, in lieu of an answer.

  “Ma’am, I can’t begin to imagine how this has been for you, but if you could spare me a few minutes, it would mean a lot to me.” Her eyes drew even more to a slant. This was the moment when Nora really gazed into another person, trying to understand, and her gaze did, indeed, shake the old woman, but only for a moment.

  “Leave me alone—what do you want to know? All I ever had has been slaughtered, burned, driven away, and now my beloved boy’s been killed. Prison is not enough for that whore . . . I saw what a snake she was.”

  “Kristina?” She tried, with every ounce of her urgency, to keep the conversation going, at least in the doorway.

  “I told him then, ‘Why couldn’t you find a normal woman, one of ours, who’d look after you, who’d bear you children! And not this teacher; did you need that?’”

  “What do you mean, ‘one of ours’?” The word “ours” immediately burned in Nora’s ear; she knew what “ours” and “theirs” meant around here.

  “Ours! That Chetnik bitch’s father fled the city way back at the beginning, and she and her mother went around telling everyone the poor man was shot, who knows by whose bullet . . . Damned half-breed.” The woman’s eyes filled with tears, and her sparse, pure-white hair was swept by a draft at the open door. This information about Kristina’s father’s background was new to Nora, and she wasn’t certain she could trust it. Just when she was about to ask for clarification, the old woman seemed to come out of a hypnotic trance and shot her a piercing look.

  “Leave me alone, and don’t you come back here again!”

  Nora was still holding her breath, feeling the warmth wash over her through the doorway and rise to her ears, which were, by now, beet red. She stood for a few minutes at the slammed door before she breathed again, and then she turned, trying to remember which road the cab had come along to bring her there. The streets on Švapsko Hill were steep and zigzagging. The best idea was to go downhill, following the slope, and keep her fingers crossed that this would bring her to a place she’d recognize. The conversation hadn’t given her much. The old woman, seared with fury and pain, had nothing left to hope for. Nora wondered how she spent her days alone in that house—how she woke up each morning and how she got up out of bed. It would be so much simpler to stay burrowed under the covers. And was there, when the old woman first opened her eyes, that moment when the memory of the horror hadn’t hit her yet? That state of floating into consciousness that lasted maybe two or three seconds, when the body, brain, heart haven’t yet adapted to reality, horror still hasn’t etched itself in the body’s DNA, and reality is only gradually settling? Nora could still summon that feeling at times. Every single day, at least one random event bolstered her conviction that her decision never to have children was the right one. Nobody won. Things were set up in such a way that something always happened, whether to the child or the parent. And after that, the remainder of one’s life was reduced to memories, waiting, repeat.

  Walking toward the center of town, Nora jotted down a few notes on her pad: Chetnik bitch, children, Kristina’s father. On her way down the hill, she decided to find a place where she could order a decent meal. She’d skipped the hotel breakfast that morning and could no longer remember when she’d last had a proper dinner. Her next appointment was set for some yet-to-be determined time in the afternoon, at the Hotel Lav café.

  She chose a table with a view over the Danube. She had her back to the entrance, so all she could see in front of her was the fat, murky green river, which she loved to watch flowing by. As a little girl, she’d been horrified by the sight of uprooted trees swept along in the currents. They traveled so slowly, but their shapes were still difficult to see clearly, changing in the watery mists. The branches jutting from the tree trunks reminded her of the arms of a drowning person waving to attract attention, but though they held their branching arms high the whole time, nobody seemed to notice. A hand appeared suddenly on the table next to her notebook, cell phone, and pens. A man’s hand, with a gold signet ring on the little finger. The owner of the hand was standing over her, his other hand across the back of Nora’s chair, watching her with tiny, watery blue eyes, a thin nose, and barely noticeable lips. His face looked as if it had been sketched by a six-year-old, with no color, details, or affect. When the straight lip line moved, he spoke—“The lovely lady is dining alone?”—and it spread into something like a smile. Nora turned, caught short by the question.

  “Yes; I mean . . .”

  “May I join you? I, too, am dining alone, and we could keep each other company,” he wheedled, reminding her of one of the characters from the Topalović family and their funeral parlor in the cult film—what was it called? From the old days of ex-Yugoslavia. She thought she remembered the words “marathon” and “family” in the title, but wasn’t sure. Yet this man seemed to be a character straight out of that film, right there in front of her, snapping his fingers to signal to the waiter that his place setting should be moved to her table.

  “Godnar.” He extended his hand, solemnly, across the table.

  She wondered for a moment whether the name he’d given was his first name or surname, and then decided to respond:

  “Nora,” and shook his hand with a nod, and her hand was already at his lips. She quickly pulled it back, slipping it under the table.

  “Godnar?” she asked. “An unusual name.”

  He concurred with a slight bow, and then explained.

  “It’s my artistic nom de plume, Grozdan Godnar.”

  “I see,” she said, and struggled not to laugh.

  “It comes from two words.” After every sentence he gave a dramatic pause. “God, and Narcissus, and I’ll only tell you my real name the second time we meet.” She thought she saw him wink.

  “Right,” said Nora. “And what sort of art do you practice?”

  “I am a poet,” he declared, exalted.

  “From around here?” she asked.

  “Indeed. Although I haven’t been living here for some time, so to speak. Tonight I’m presenting a volume of my po
ems, dedicated to my native city, so if you aren’t busy elsewhere, I will be so bold as to invite you to my reading from Elegy for a City. You look like a poetry lover.” After the remark, founded on nothing, he fished a book out of his briefcase. The cover design was remarkably ugly: his face. When he showed her the foreword, written by Peter Handke, things fell into place for Nora, though she was no poetry aficionado. She remembered that Handke was known as an outspoken supporter of Serbs, so this Godnar fellow must be a member of the city’s expatriate Serbian community. During their aimless and even bizarre conversation, she did whatever she could to steer him toward what was currently going on in the city, but this soon proved nearly impossible, as the poet spoke of nothing but himself and his philosophical take on the world. He treated her to a few lines of verse from his collection in which celestial motifs followed one after another; the patriarch as glorious transgressor, alchemy as the cross and the poetic subject who was crucified every day in the labyrinthine circle . . . Before the end of lunch, when she asked him whether he’d heard of the case of the teenage lover, the schoolteacher, and her murdered husband, he presented his theory:

  “Ah, all the murders . . . you know . . .” He shook his head with resignation. “Our entire population lives, flounders, and dies in their grim Slavic legacy. And when the passions of love light up this little life, it must drown here in blood! And then everyone wants to know: Who’s to blame? Who’s to blame? But they don’t realize that a night of spectral will has descended upon them . . . Why, those very words appear in the title of one of my poems, one of the finer ones, actually. This city experienced the fate of a lost lamb facing a horde of ravenous wolves . . . And that, too, arises in my poems.”