“Well thanks, again.” She didn’t know how to say goodbye. “And for seeing me back—after all, I went with the special.” She extended her hand in a parting gesture. He clasped it and held it longer, more tenderly, then released it.
“Take care, Nora.” He pulled her to him, hugging her with his other arm. “And don’t stay here long,” he whispered to her through her hair.
She nodded in his embrace and then turned and left. She thought about how she still had so much to do in the city.
9.
A few years for us
do you know how I want to find you
do I know what I need to know
love me like you’ve never loved
before (early summer 2010)
One of the Croatian war veterans, Zolja, ended up in a coma that night. He hurt his head badly when he slipped and whacked his temple on the steel footrest under the bar. There was shoving, shouting, spitting, heated words, but when the men in blue charged into the café, everyone’s eyes went bloodshot. They were particularly touchy about this, our cops facing off against our war veterans, and why? Those damned Cyrillic signs.
Ante and his buddies gathered that night where they usually gathered, at Ferrari, had a little to drink, and then went off to patrol the city. Out in front of a city building a young greenhorn, a local cop, legs akimbo, stood on guard under the sign in Cyrillic, his hands on his back. His balls visibly shook when he saw them stopping, but when they started throwing stones and chanting their rallying cries, the kid pulled out his nightstick and lunged at Zolja. He struck him several times on the back, and since Zolja was already a little unsteady on his feet, he buckled. The rest of them swarmed the young cop, but he’d already managed to say something into his Motorola, so soon shouts were heard from a side street; the police station was only minutes away. Ante flung Zolja’s arm over his shoulder and all four of them staggered back to Ferrari. They were pumped with adrenaline, feeling like they’d felt in the old days, and Maki, the barman, showed them pictures he’d managed to snap on his cell phone, showing Zolja being beaten.
“Goddamn, this goes straight to the newspapers tomorrow morning!”
Soon they figured out who the shithead was who was wearing our uniform. His name was Saša; nobody cared that he was ethnically Ruthenian, they’d find him. And then, not even an hour later, our cops came charging in to question everybody who knew something about the attack on Croatian policeman Saša.
“Fuck your mother!” shouted Zolja, a finger-thick blood vessel popping out on his neck.
“Come now, boys!” came from the other side, from the phalanx of cops. Just when Zolja was about to heave a bottle at them, he slipped on the beer-slick floor, fell and gashed his head deeply. He stayed there, on the floor, and for the first few seconds they thought he’d dropped off to sleep, and then dark, greasy blood began spreading under the tips of their shoes. They lifted him up; he was covered in blood, and they could have pushed two fingers into the hole in his skull. Ante told all this, firsthand, to Ilinčić, who listened closely, his hands folded. His fingers tapped the tip of his nose, and his thumbs stroked his freshly shaven chin.
“We’ll go out there again if needed; there’re plenty of us!” Ante wrapped up the story.
“Hold your horses, Ante.” Ilinčić shook his head.
“Why the hell not; should we let them pick us off one by one? What’s happened to you, old man? You used to have balls!”
“Ante, don’t you worry about my balls. Wise up. You can’t go around the city beating up cops; you aren’t barbarians!”
“The kid lunged at us, I’m telling you!”
“I believe you, I believe you . . . but you know, what if that hadn’t been Saša? And what then? You’ll kill all of them one after another? This stinks. And here, I’m reading in the newspaper that Zolja’s blood-alcohol content was at 0.2 percent. You were obviously, all of you, drunk as dogs.”
“Well, we did have a drop to drink, sure . . . We’re not children!”
“This stinks. That’s all I’ll say about it. Your actions are doing harm, Ante. You should be more in-tel-li-gent. Are you listening?” He laid his hand on Ante’s shoulder. Ante nodded.
“Here, let’s take, for example”—Ilinčić moved in his seat, leaned forward, and seemed about to say something important—“your wife.”
“What about my wife?” Ante started.
“Why, the business with the school, the way they’re harassing her—”
“They are idiots! I know them, that crazy woman, Vujanović.” Here he compressed his lips and gulped. “And my wife is an idiot; all over those kids, as if they’re hers. But she can’t be made to see reason.”
“Hey, shut up, Ante, and listen to what I’m saying.” Ilinčić interrupted him and then, for a few moments, scratched his face in silence. “We can use this.”
“What?” asked Ante, confused. “My wife?”
“Yes, your wife. That’s the least you can do, for all of us, see?”
“She won’t go along with this. Damn it, she even defends them!”
“Come now, why wouldn’t she, Ante? I’ve had a word with her; she will, of course she will. Be smart about this. Let her go to the media. Let everyone see how things stand for us here: Our teachers. How we’re being told not to attend concerts of our own songs. How we have to be careful not to go overboard in showing how much we love our country. That’s our path, Ante. Not stone-throwing and boozing, you know; use that noggin of yours . . .”
“But what now; what can I do to her? I don’t like the idea of violence.”
“No violence, for God’s sake, Ante. I’ll take care of this; you just voice support when it’s needed. Get it now?”
“Got it. And thank you. You’re the real deal, our man.”
“Always have been, always will be,” said Ilinčić as he stood up, and then he swatted Ante across the back of his head. Ante was left sitting and thinking how to win over his wife. This soured him, again; he simply could not understand how she could be so gullible and stupid. She was stuck to proving the truth, as if there were such a thing, and as if anybody cared. And because of her pigheadedness, he had to admit he was actually a little pleased that all this was happening to her. Let her see what it was like when she didn’t listen to him; maybe that would wise her up. Luckily there were still people like Ilinčić who, despite his high-level position, was willing to go the extra mile for the cause. He decided not to force anything, but he’d be a little tougher on his wife. She used to be more attentive, make the effort, try to please him. He was the one who found her the job as soon as they returned to the city. He was some ten years older and was pleased to have a younger wife. But then, bit by bit, she began talking more about a normal life. When are we going to start living like normal people? That was how she put her questions to him, but what did she mean by normal? Was he supposed to forget all that had happened and how it happened? If there hadn’t been me, goddammit, there wouldn’t be you. And so on and so forth. While the war was on, everyone treated him with awe and respect, but now, wherever he went, it was as if he were a leper. What? You expect kid-glove treatment? Damned right we do! Fuck your goddamned mother. That was normal, not this. The minister in charge of war veterans wants to assign the veterans, us, to serve as marshals for a gay parade! Hey! Who ever heard of such a thing! What have they done to earn the gratitude of this country?! Butt-fucking, most likely. Ante was still ramped up; ever since he’d stepped in Zolja’s blood, all he wanted was for all those who didn’t respect him and didn’t understand him to get the hell out of his line of vision. He wanted to go back to the front lines, and then, when he came home, everyone would weep for joy that he was back. He wanted to be back with his boys again, boys he could look in the eyes and know he’d never have a bond like that with anybody else. We faced death together; who cares about wives, fuck them. The only place he didn’t return to i
n his thoughts was the prison camp; he’d repressed that part: the empty circle around him and his thick, warm socks, the way some of the former prisoners looked away when they passed by him in town, his first encounter with her, when they were living in the same apartment building. He missed her, later, and wanted to kill her, later.
And now he had to put up with this shit, people laughing at him. One day he saw schoolchildren on the tanks that stood like trophies at the entrance to the city. They were climbing around on them and making faces, taking each other’s pictures in silly poses, giving the finger, those little bastards; they had no idea what it had been like to stand in front of a tank. To soothe his thoughts a little he started leafing through the newspapers, and then he saw a statement from the veterans’ minister regarding the incident the night before. The heading read: It was the booze that knocked him down, not the Croatian cop! He closed the paper, crumpled it into a ball, and went home to his wife.
ÄÄÄ
Circle
the wind thinks
the wind knows
everything we know, you and I
it loves me
it carries me
it smashes me
What with his connections in Osijek, people in the city and in the national administration he’d found jobs for or who owed him a favor, it wasn’t difficult to come up with an inspector who’d suspend the teacher and coax this thing along. To our benefit, of course. This was, after all, for her own good. She’d be fine. For a time she’d be out of work, sure; she’d be the rallying cry for our struggle. A good thing she has an education, and then he’d find her a job in a better, ethnically pure school. One day she’d be grateful. When the suspension was announced due to her alleged irregularities and her overstepping of the bounds of her job as teacher, the Serbian parents finally went wild. They demanded her ouster, filed a lawsuit against her; the path was open for them. Through all of this, Ilinčić, indirectly, was the one pulling the strings. If the inspection had come up with a different finding, everything would have quickly died down. Kristina would have been brought back to work. But as it was, the situation veered off in a different direction. The school was besieged, teeming with journalists and representatives of nongovernmental organizations. Nikola Vrcić, the junior reporter, took down statements from agitated parents, and apparently the teacher had been systematically abusing the students for years, but out of fear that their children might bear the brunt in school if they complained, the parents had been afraid to speak up until now. She’d insulted them, mocked them, said that it was better for them to leave the city as soon as they could, that this would never be their home. The situation was pushed up to the highest level, and with it Kristina’s despair. By then she was living in complete isolation. They’d all abandoned her, everyone but Dejan. He came by regularly, they found a rhythm; theirs were the mornings whenever he was at school on the afternoon shift. He’d enter her quickly, convulsively, miserably, and afterwards she’d sob for a long time in his arms. Each of them took from the relationship what they needed; he was convinced he loved her and would give his life for her, her softness, her inner warmth, the place between her breasts where he laid his head. She had a person to comfort her, to sacrifice everything for her, to trace the shadows on her face—someone who wouldn’t hurt her. She’d completely forgotten that he was seventeen. She refused to think about it. He told her how they’d leave there together as soon as he finished high school and go somewhere far away, the Netherlands, maybe, or Sweden. When he came of age, only a half year from then. Nobody would look at them sideways there. He was prepared for anything; he wouldn’t even mind starting out with a gas station job, or, like his uncle in Stockholm, delivering furniture, driving a truck, anything, just so the two of them could be together on their own, far from all of this. Without second thoughts about leaving this shit-filled, weird city—and even his own mother—behind. The thought that he’d never see her again didn’t dismay him. He could talk about this for an hour without stopping, about how, once he’d learned the language, he’d be able to advance in every way. He didn’t need anybody but her. Kristina listened to him as if hypnotized; deep inside she didn’t believe a word he said, but she did enjoy his soothing voice, colored by hope. Those two, three hours each day were her escape from the despair tightening around her throat all the rest of the time. Then at one moment she would snap out of it, come to her senses, kick him out, unable to bear herself or him, until the next day, when she let him in without a word. The sofa bed in the living room was made up as a bed all day long now; she had been sleeping on it for the last months. She could no longer bear to lie next to Ante; he flung himself onto their bed, usually drunk, seldom taking off his clothes.
She got up, cracked opened the door for Dejan, and without a word went back to the sofa. Dejan followed her, looking at her back, too far behind her to reach out and touch her. She lay back down right away, closing her eyes. He lay down next to her and began kissing her eyelids. She was still warm from sleep and very pale. He lifted her T-shirt, nuzzling into her stomach, and pulled it over his head. He heard nothing but the rustle of the cloth and his heart; he didn’t hear the front door opening, instead he suddenly felt Kristina’s convulsive jerk and a knee to the throat which knocked the air clear out of him. Only then did he hear the scream and feel a powerful blow to the back of his head, and then somebody grabbed him by the hair, almost lifting him up from the bed. He fell between the sofa and the sideboard, gasping for air.
“You deranged whore!” howled Ante, moving toward Kristina, lunging to smack her in the face. Kristina ducked, leaped over the armchair and side table and escaped into the hallway. Meanwhile Dejan pulled himself together and straightened up. He was ready for anything. Ante turned to him; his hands were huge, his face red, his mouth foaming. He grabbed Dejan by the neck and smashed his head into the wall.
“Call the police!” shouted Dejan, but a deafening roar at that moment sliced through his yell, and Ante slumped to the floor. He could see Kristina standing in the hall, pistol in hand, phantomlike, her face stripped of all expression. Ante was still for a few seconds, and then began wheezing. Kristina’s face fractured and crumbled into a thousand pieces. Dejan stepped over Ante and took the pistol from her hand. He would not let her go into this abyss alone; he aimed at the body on the floor and fired twice more. After a time, Ante’s face went slack, his forehead and cheeks finally realigned, and Dejan, standing over him, stared, horrified, as he saw his own chin, lips, and forehead surface in Ante’s features; seeing Ante’s face was like seeing himself, asleep, in a mirror.
10.
Time to cleanse
time to cleanse
time to cleanse
time to cleanse
now (fall 2010)
“Hello?”
“I need you.”
“How long has it been?”
“Twenty-three months.”
“I’m not up for this anymore, Brigita.”
“I’ll never call you again. Name your price.”
“Somebody important?”
“He’s out to destroy me.”
“Fine; we should meet.”
“Wherever you say, I’ll be there. I need you today.”
Part Two: This Is the Country for Us
11.
Eyes the color of honey
your lips on me
your hands on me
I grip a knife between my teeth
shape-changing like an otter
strapping saber to thigh
now (fall 2010)
No lights were on; the windows were like black holes in the shabby hotel. He stared at them so long they seemed to be spilling and swelling, brimming over. Nora’s room faced the water and a sandy midriver island that couldn’t be seen in the dark. If she ever turned on the light. The volume of water—sluicing through the riverbed at a pace that only seemed to be slow—wa
s not easy to see, but it could be sensed. Marko stood there for a time out in front of the hotel, and then, after a pause, headed for his apartment, turning to look away from the water. Back at the beginning, years ago now, when the war felt like a movie and a huge adventure, one of the early mornings when the mist over the river was milky and at its most dense, he gazed out over this stretch of water on his way home from sentry duty and stopped to wonder who’d been logging so much lumber and how was it possible that all the logs were floating down the river, en masse, like that. The scene drew him, and down he went along the quay to take a closer look. The logs were moving slowly enough for him to see that they were clothed in ripped T-shirts and pants, around some of them swirled tubelike ribbons of dangling white intestines that, floating, bumped, tangled, met and pulled apart, as if rehearsing a synchronized dance number. All these were men, big, brawny, but lifeless. Ever since then he didn’t swim in the Danube anymore, even though the summer before the war he’d been one of the boys who felt compelled to swim across it at the end of the school year. He’d felt the river was a part of him; he identified with it, gulped it down, let it sweep him along, lost himself in the river’s depths. While he was a boy, Uncle Jovica, whose house looked out over the same courtyard as his did, took him fishing, only him of all the kids in the neighborhood. All because Marko had the patience for it; he could sit for hours in silence and keep track of the minute shifts in the nature around him and never be bored; he found the river far more engrossing than snapping the tails off of lizards. Marko’s father had died young, collapsed in the garden while picking cherries. Bees swarmed his face, covered his eyes; he lay in the grass, his mouth slightly open, his head flung back, the cloud of bees guzzling the sweet juice until the seven-year-old boy came out to summon him to dinner. The autopsy showed he’d had a heart defect, a minor thickening of the cardiac muscle that had waited until that summer afternoon to reshape their lives. Marko’s mother was warned at the time that the defect was congenital and she should take the boy to see a doctor. His short life was split into pre-bees and post-bees. A brief spell of warmth and something indefinably sweet, and then his first clear memory—when they visited Belgrade, not long after his father’s death. His anxious mother took him to the Military Medical Academy for an ultrasound of his heart; the place was all vast and cold, and the doctor’s diagnosis confirmed the local doctor’s suspicions. The big tin soldier, who looked nothing like a doctor to Marko, pinched him on the chin with ice-cold fingers while announcing that there was good news after all: the boy would live. His little organism pulled itself oddly together in a cardiac counteroffensive which he’d rely on in the years to come as a kind of life principle, but the soldier-doctor must have cast a curse on him, just like in a fairy tale, when, wagging the boy’s jaw between thumb and forefinger, he declared: “You’ll be back when the time comes for you to serve as a soldier. We’ll meet again! Take care, my boy!” When the time did come, in 1990, for his military service, coinciding as it did with the start of the war, Marko did his damnedest to evade the army, using his heart defect as his excuse, but nothing worked that year: not the certificate issued by the university showing he was enrolled in the study of Slavic languages and literatures, nor his mother’s terrified pleas to chop off just one finger, which he couldn’t agree to because he loved playing the guitar. At the time he’d have rather died than agree to a life without music. He came home only twice from his year in the navy in the Montenegrin coastal town of Tivat, and his mother visited him there once. Over four months, the longest he’d ever gone without seeing her, she seemed to have aged at least fifteen years; in one of the rare photographs there was a brisk wind blowing at her back while she stood on a dock and, weighing scarcely over a hundred pounds, looked as if she were about to be whisked away by the wind. Marko had his arm around her and looked as if he were holding her down; he was young, with too serious a gaze, full of a prescient sense of dread at something coming, something imminent and horrible. He returned from the navy in the summer of 1991 and tried, again, to enroll at the university. His efforts resulted in little more than a trip to the chaos-ridden city of Belgrade for the entrance exam. Posters featuring Slobodan Milošević were already plastered everywhere. Marko had sold off his comic book collection so he could at least attend a music festival while he was there. When he came home he discovered his mother’s sudden aging was because she had bone cancer. She could no longer stand at her station at the factory. She went on sick leave and never returned to work. For the next months, Marko stayed with her and never got around to enrolling. Meanwhile he was recruited for a unit that was a hybrid, a cross between the regular army and territorial defense, something that never officially existed, nor were there documents or a commander to prove it had; it functioned, indeed, as a link between the Yugoslav People’s Army and the unruly Serb territorials. The unit was made up of mercenaries and young reservists who hadn’t seen what was coming quickly enough, mustered by appeals that played on their sense of patriotism, the duty they’d sworn to uphold, and fueled by youth, inexperience, and a crushing sense of having no way forward. They were all promised financial reward at a time when nobody had a job, and as soon as this is over, once we’ve eviscerated the Ustashas—in a week or two, max, the finest medical care possible would be available to Marko’s mother at the Belgrade Military Medical Academy.
We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day Page 9
