“I’ll come up with something,” he promised, whispering in her ear, while they lay on the alcohol-soaked sofa. He nuzzled up to her, while she stared at the ceiling, turning her face away from the fragrance of his hair.
“I won’t leave you alone, not ever.” Damp and sweaty, he pressed up against her.
“Go now,” she said, leaving no room for doubt, looking him straight in the eye.
“Fine, I’ll go; don’t worry.” He was trying to give her everything he had.
“Oh, come on; this will sort itself out somehow.” This was the most tenderness she could allow herself and the most she had for him. She saw him to the front hall, suffering the little shards of glass in her bare feet without a sound. She didn’t want him there anymore, just as strongly as she wished herself somewhere else. She could even disappear, whatever. When she shut the door behind him, her eyes went to the safe in the hallway.
7.
Money in hands
buy me sell me
money in hands
then, recent (fall 2010)
On the cell phone screen there were twenty-seven missed calls. There had been at least as many every day, sometimes more but never fewer, ever since the daily papers published the transcript of the conversation, and then the most riveting parts of the recording were played on the evening news. Brigita had expected the mayor’s reaction and that it would be violent, but the leader of her political party promised she’d be protected in every possible way and she could count on a term of office at city hall, later maybe even in the Assembly, and he tripled all the mayor’s other offers. All she had to do was keep her head down for a time until the worst of the storm blew over. But the mayor did not give up, no surprise; first he denied everything, then he declared the recording doctored, then he claimed amnesia, and finally he began calling her day and night. It made no difference when she changed her number; within twenty-four hours he’d unearthed the new one. At one point she’d had enough; she didn’t feel so much intimidated as irritated and hopping with adrenaline. When the phone rang for the twenty-eighth time that day, she picked up.
“Hello?” she said sharply. All she heard over the phone was silence, likely the mayor’s confusion; no doubt he’d been dialing the number automatically and wasn’t expecting a response. Then he pulled himself together.
“Ah, Brigita, darling little Brigita, where have you been? No word from you for days? Didn’t we say we’d get together for coffee?”
“What do you want?”
“Listen, you were right with what you said about the friendships between men and women; it looks as if this old mule was all wrong . . .”
“Please stop calling. Things are as they are. You didn’t leave me much choice.”
“Really? Not the way I saw it, Brigita darling . . . But know what? I’ll give you what you so nicely call a ‘choice.’” He laughed bitterly.
“Meaning?” She wasn’t about to beat around the bush.
“I’ll leave you the choice of rescinding this in public, admitting you set me up, or of having your kids read in the papers the truth about their mother.”
“No point in threatening me; you’ll get nowhere with that,” she snarled.
“Oh, I’m not threatening; heavens no, Brigita. Just want to be absolutely sure you’re good with a charming little piece coming out in the next day or two about the beginnings of your career at the InterContinental massage salon? So adorable, I must say!” Brigita was about to respond, but she froze. Quickly collecting her thoughts, she waited to hear what else he had up his sleeve.
“I’ve got the pictures, see?” he sneered. “What about that coffee, now? Eh?”
“What pictures?” she asked coldly, and he could tell she was suddenly concerned.
“From your youthful years, darling little Brigita! Sweet as candy . . . cutting quite the figure with that baseball bat . . . If only I’d known this earlier, I’d have been so much smarter. But who’d have guessed! And a teacher, no less!”
“What do you want?”
“All I’m asking is for us to get together for coffee, Brigita darling. It’s worth our while, for both of us. The damage may still be fixable. What do you say? Maybe you were just having a little fun? You do so love a laugh . . .”
“When?”
“Tomorrow night at ten, out by the hangar.”
“Fine,” she answered dryly and hung up.
She should never have picked up. He was probably bluffing. There couldn’t be any pictures; nobody knew anything about it. Except for the Boss, who was dead, and Schweppes, who’d taken the pictures, and her. It was only for a brief time. She hadn’t had the sleaze to see it through, though the offers poured in from everywhere. One drunken night at the casino, after her shift, the Boss sidled over to her table. His eyes swam with an oily gaze, and at his side swung the rounded end of his stained wooden bat. In his other hand he held a leather leash, leading a German shepherd with a muzzle over its shiny black snout. The dog watched her, its head cocked to the side. The boss stood in front of her and dropped a big roll of bills onto the green felt tabletop. She wasn’t sure what he had in mind. He came up to her and, with his clammy breath, said:
“To make an ad for the business.” Then he winked, took her under the arm, and led her down to the basement of the casino where the massage salon was.
A stage set had been arranged. A red cloth backdrop hung on a frame and stretched across the floor for six, seven feet. Two small reflectors had been set up on the sides. On a nearby table there were collar-shaped bracelets, a bow tie, a few items of black lingerie, and a silk blindfold. The Boss pointed the bat at the lingerie and said, tersely:
“Do it.”
Brigita went behind a partition and started unbuttoning her clothes, hands trembling. She made no attempt to object, though she was seething. She chose three items and put them on: the collar-shaped bracelets, the bow tie, and the black, see-through panties. She stepped out and almost blithely asked: “What now?” looking the Boss right in the eye. He swung the wooden bat and tossed it to Brigita. She caught it deftly.
“Now have fun,” he said, arching his eyebrows. Then he dropped into an armchair and let the German shepherd off the leash. Holding the greasy bat in her hands she felt strange, but not bad. She stood, covered in gooseflesh, in the middle of the cold room.
“Need inspiration?” This was the first and last time she snorted cocaine. She and Schweppes. Then he came up behind her and tied the blindfold over her eyes. She danced in the dark, sensing the pungent odor of animal fur, and he snapped the pictures. All three of them stayed in the basement room until the next afternoon. Only once did she ask Schweppes about the pictures—they were already together by then—and he swore he’d destroyed them, her face couldn’t be seen on a single one; he told the Boss they hadn’t turned out well. She no longer gave a thought to that night. Brigita was able to put things like this behind her. Never a thought, until today. She considered calling the party leader, then realized she couldn’t. Nobody else must be involved in this. She hadn’t heard in years from the only person she could have called.
ÄÄÄ
For nights now he hadn’t been sleeping. He went out and rambled around the city, eyes glued to the pavement, while all those near to him, and at the office, went on acting as if nothing had happened. Whenever he looked up and saw, in the distance, black hair done up in a ponytail, blood flushed his face; he gasped for breath and clenched his fists. At the camp they’d called him Red. When they interrogated him before beatings, a red flush spread across his face, and their blows pummeled the patches of red. After coming back from the camp, he spent the next few years at a hotel on the Adriatic Coast. In his early forties he was granted a disability pension and declared unfit to work. Once he stood so close to the edge of the Krk Bridge, while cars whizzed by, that he felt the ease of the space between the concrete and the se
a. He found staying on the solid bridge unbearably difficult, and was never able to explain the moment, except as his discovery of God. The vast amount of irrational evil he’d witnessed in his life required at least an equal measure of irrational good for a person to find a sense of balance. When he succeeded in this, he pulled himself together and, after a few years, became again what he had been, neither evil or good, neither a believer or a non-believer, a small, pragmatic man who, the more he was given the more he needed. And so it was that he began to see himself as a local powermonger who wasn’t entirely bereft of ideals, but, on the way to the top, ideals regularly find their place in the theoretical realm. In practice, votes are bought, hiring is rigged, secret accounts are opened, the official’s public profile is tweaked, the government is cheated at every turn. The mayor stumbled when he placed too much trust in his own preeminence and importance, just as he had trusted—in that space on the bridge between the pavement and the sea— that there really was something else beyond the sound of the buffeting gale winds. Now there was very little for him to lose. His wife had left him some time ago, she’d been living in their summer cottage over the last months. Their daughter was living abroad, and throughout the madhouse she’d only called her mother once to ask how they were doing. He was politically done for, although he found this difficult to acknowledge. When he pleaded with a colleague whose close family friend was the minister of the interior to find him something, he was told there was a photograph of a scantily clad woman, crouching, blindfolded, holding a wooden bat, while a large animal rocked her balance. Brigita was not easily recognizable in the picture, but if one studied it closely for a long time—and considering her biography, or so his colleague claimed—this had to be her. Younger, nimbler, and far more wanton, but her. Getting his hands on the photograph from the secret file wouldn’t be easy; he didn’t have the money nor was he owed a big enough favor, but even knowing that such a photograph existed was of inestimable value. The mayor hadn’t made plans for exactly what he hoped to extract from her. Eating crow in public, a retraction, an admission of incompetence, anything that might reinstate him to at least some share of the power he’d enjoyed, although he’d relinquish it all just for the opportunity to throttle her with his bare hands. She had disgraced him, humiliated him, and this is what stirs the basest feelings in a person. Murders are motivated most often by feelings of shame and humiliation provoked in the murderer by the victim; all other motives rank far below these. He changed the shirt he’d worn for the last two days and nights and, checking his watch, he realized he didn’t have to be anywhere in particular until the next evening. And nobody cared. He paced around the apartment, remembering the apes in cages at the zoo that were always laughing; he couldn’t bear looking at them for too long. They knew full well that there was no way out for them, and there was something maniacal about their every movement, even when they were playing their usual games to see which were the stronger and which were the weaker apes.
8.
Into darkness we run
the stars hid from us
winter picked apart our bones
the wind howled loud
now (fall 2010)
Early autumns by the seaside were something entirely different; you could see the air was warmer; even the Zagreb fall was milder, monotonously subdued between the slightly chillier mornings and evenings. Although the evening wasn’t yet fully dark when she left the hotel for the second time at dusk, Nora pulled the collar of her coat up to shield herself at least a little from the icy wind blowing off the river. The wind here was different from the wind along the coast, the bura, that used to chill her to the bone. Here, it chilled her head, numbed her skin, fingers, and cheeks, drew tears from her eyes. She set out for the Hotel Lav; the poet had written down the address of the place where the reading would be held. The words Gundulićeva 19, Reading Room were scribbled on the back of the business card. While at the hotel she’d checked on the Internet to see how to get there; Google Maps said it would be a ten-minute walk, the same as for any destination within the city. But there wasn’t anything at the address resembling a reading room; the building had a deceptively mundane appearance. It was set apart by the huge flag hanging down its facade. Inside it were the consular offices of the Republic of Serbia, as well as a consular reading room where Serbian cultural events, performances of folklore, and commemorations were held. The building had belonged until recently to the son of city councillor Velimirović, who sold it to the Republic of Serbia and was given in return a three-bedroom apartment in the center of Belgrade, thereby permanently resolving several of his problems. Before this the consulate had been housed in a far more pretentious-looking building, its greatest failing being that it was built without proper building permits during the period of Serbian occupation; earlier buildings on that site had been leveled, along with their tenants. A group of a dozen or so people was gathering in the courtyard of the white three-story building, clustering in little groups; they all knew each other. Nora had the impression that most of the guests were eyeing each unfamiliar newcomer with suspicion, and were communicating among themselves with gestures and glances that were meaningful, precise. She tried to gauge the profile of the average poetry lover who’d come for a dose of aesthetic exorcism, or perhaps some of them regularly frequented the consular reading room. Through her mind flashed the thought that they all had something gray in their auras, and just then the poet spotted her, having leaped, literally, out from the shrubs next to the building. “I cannot believe it!” he exclaimed, elated. She wasn’t quick enough to stop him from pressing her hand, again, to his lips. “Though I am a believer, and you must know I was hoping! Still, we’d met only once,” he halted. “I won’t disappoint you this evening.” He did not drop her hand.
Nora simpered politely, feeling relief—after the poet’s gushing performance and his mistaken impression that the two of them enjoyed a special relationship—that the people standing around them had returned to their regular consular conversations. The poet ushered her into a broad hallway and tried to wrest her coat from her, but Nora wrangled with him for several minutes and held on to her coat and purse. Meanwhile the reading room filled; when she peeked around the door she saw that all the seats had been taken. The poet was already sitting at the table facing the audience, and when he saw her at the door he gestured frantically for her to sit in the first row in one of the two remaining empty seats, right next to Velimirović. The journalist, Nikola, Velimirović’s young protege, was sitting on his other side, whispering intimately in Velimirović’s ear, clearly mixing business and pleasure. At first Nora shook her head politely, and then pretended she didn’t understand. The poet’s gestures and the gray-haired heads all turning to stare at her made her skin crawl. In the seats on either side of the poet sat an elderly woman with spiderweblike hair and olive-hued skin, another shade of gray, with bulky jewelry strung around her wrinkly neck, and a very young man with upper-lip fuzz that was not quite ready for a shave. The young man was introduced as a member of the Sveti Stefan drama group; he would be reciting the poet’s verses.
“And now we’ll sketch our poet’s context to help you get to know him better.” The elderly moderator in her creaky voice introduced her remarks on the poet’s life.
“Our Grozdan was born not far from here in the month of March—a time of year that heralds springtime and life, but that very same month the Danube River flooded the city. At the time, nobody saw this as a symbol of a coming flood, nor would anybody have believed that twenty-six years hence, the city would become a new Atlantis. But perhaps this is the very moment where we should seek the genesis of his creative opus, the reason why Grozdan would become a poet whose verses would capture the apocalyptic accent of our world and the spirit of rebellion. Borne by the powerful force of precognition, he unmistakably forecasts the cataclysm and the integral deconstruction of the world. He draws through aesthetic exorcism the times we have fallen victim to and their i
mage. Meanwhile he practices the meditational techniques of Vipassana, Kundalini, Nada Brahma, and Nataraj, and has shown a growing interest in the cultures of the East,” enumerated the moderator, while Nora—standing the farthest from the improvised stage at an elevated vantage point within the room, the only person standing by the door—focused on the nonverbal processes going on within the reading room. The older members of the audience, in the first rows, were struggling to stay awake and swearing to themselves that as soon as they made it home tonight they wouldn’t stop to brush their teeth, or what was left of them, but would hop straight into bed. Several of the middle-aged ladies soaked up every word, their eyes wide, nodding like mechanical toys. It would take them weeks to recover from the marvels of the evening. Through the sliver of a gap between the audience members and the chairs, Nora could see Velimirović’s fingers on the edge of the seat of Nikola’s chair, drumming to the rhythm of the creaky voice, and the poet’s impassive gaze, soaking up, chameleonlike, the romanticized paeans of praise with the entire surface of his body. She noticed one of the feet of the young man who’d be reading the verses twitch uncontrollably under the embroidered tablecloth. His voice cracked as he fought to recite “Poem to My Native City” in a loud voice, almost shouting: “They extracted you from my body as if you were my gall bladder”—bellicose, tearful, overdone.
Just then, Velimirović stood up and, hunched over with his cell phone to his ear, strode by Nora without noticing her turn to follow him, shadowlike, while rummaging through her purse for cigarettes. Velimirović moved into the depths of the courtyard while she remained hidden in the shadows under an overarching balcony. A beam of light from a spotlight on the façade of the building lit his broad shoulders, framed by the darkness and black branches. He shifted from foot to foot, and the conversation so engrossed him that he briefly perched, several times, on one foot. He spoke in a soft mumble, widening the circle of his pace through the courtyard, coming at one point right to a slender birch tree not far from Nora, who was keeping her eyes trained on him. He ran his fingers over the birch bark, tenderly smoothing the loose white ribbons, as if nursing the tree back to health, like he was in his own backyard, somewhere where the very bark of the trees and their seasonal changes were familiar to him. Nora wasn’t in the mood to go back in. She was sickened by this whole circus of the unnamed apocalypse which had, floodlike, inundated the city, these people out to retailor history, to translate their bystander role into one of victimhood—and, leading the charge, the narcissistic poet flogging his story to the world. This travesty inspired in her first sarcasm, then fury, and then grief. Of Velimirović she knew what everyone knew; more or less everything he’d done was public knowledge, yet somehow this wasn’t enough to damage his reputation. He’d trained as a psychiatrist and earned his medical degree in Belgrade; his professional, wartime, and political career, in Croatia, reached its peak in the autumn of 1991, when he marched into the devastated city as the officer in charge of the Medical Corps for Western Srem. He and Goran Hadžić were, in fact, the first to venture into the ruins of the hospital. As a high-ranking official, Hadžić served as a minister in the Serbian Krajina government, and at the signing of the Erdut Agreement Velimirović represented a new Serbian party formed during the transitional administration by fusing together several existing parties, to distance him from his previous party, which was illegal and notorious. This was the way Velimirović came to be a political leader. He was decorated at the infamous Bosnian Serbian headquarters at Pale by Radovan Karadžić with the Order for Wartime Services in the Danube River Valley, and only a few years later, he received another medal for his contribution to the peaceful reintegration of the Danube River Valley. The current political balance of the city often depended on him. When there were not enough votes on the right or the left to establish a majority, Velimirović stepped in, massaging to the maximum the corrupt potential of the local political system.
We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day Page 7
