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The room was bathed in sunlight. Partly because the blinds were broken, partly because she’d slept well and woken later than she usually did, especially when sleeping in a hotel. As soon as she opened her eyes, the feelings from the night before flooded back. She lay in bed a little longer, and when she realized she was thinking in unexpected detail about Marko’s hands, his nose, and how his jacket smelled, she leaped out of bed and quickly pulled on her clothes, brushing her teeth along the way. She broke into a light sweat at the thought of how much time she’d wasted. She still didn’t even have a full page of copy; she’d been unable to come up with anything up to the point, anything useful. Brigita Arsovska had put off their meeting, and Nora had wasted time at the ludicrous poetry reading and later with Marko. No, that wasn’t wasted time. Her third and last day, she had to wrap this up; there was no chance they’d fork over for another night at her hotel—and this reminded her she ought to call her editor, whose call she’d ignored the day before. It was still early, not yet seven thirty, so she decided to go to breakfast and then at least get her notes in order before she met with the former school principal. She hurried down the stairs and through the dark hallway and came out into the morning light of the nearly empty restaurant.
There he sat, at the same table where he’d been sitting the night before, only now he was freshly shaven and wearing a white shirt. He was leafing through the newspaper, and his cell phones lay on the table, side by side. She could smell the powerful fragrance of his aftershave, which reminded her of teenage boys. She was beginning to feel she was running into such types wherever she turned. The sense of accomplishment and a well-done job among her colleagues was often mere decoration to pretty up archetypal male rivalry. They used Macs and iPhones, but otherwise the mechanisms were unchanged. The worst part of the male principle, the jousting and the pissing contests. Whoever lost had to go to war. She’d been stopped in her tracks the other day by a story on the evening news: veterans who had clashed with police were standing, hemmed in by a cordon, and one of them yelled at the police that they’d be seeing each other soon, and that the war is not over; it’s only beginning! Nobody in the crowd had a retort for this, although some of the veterans were clutching tanks of bottled gas. Observed through the prism of the society where she’d grown up and in which she now lived, the war was actually a shiny, radiant point people kept returning to; they hadn’t moved on from what they still saw as a time of pride and glory. The aggression, destruction, and devastation continued, only now it was no longer about defending the country. Two decades since the war, damaging behavior was still being honored, exalted, treated as if it were holy, bringing with it a death worth hurtling toward before others beat you to it. The worst part of the male principle directly provoked the worst in the female. The action and reaction brought about woman’s inexhaustible thirst for self-sacrifice and service to a destructive patriarchal system. The elderly woman, only half-alive, whom they decorated on patriotic occasions, trotting her out whenever needed, had given four sons for the homeland and was on display as the model mother, though she was never asked whether anybody actually gave their children to the homeland or whether the homeland simply came for them one day and never brought them back. A stubby, crackpot Italian watched from his small Italian town the exhilarating outbreak of war from across the shallows of the Adriatic Sea, and decided, at the age of twenty, to play at being a combatant. Three months later, he ended up at the bottom of a pit with a bullet in his brain and was given a gravel-paved street as an expression of Croatian gratitude: the Italian with a Croatian heart, the hero, the silly boy with an excess of testosterone. Nora was allergic to the phrase “gave their lives.” Nobody would give their life if they were asked to in so many words, and certainly not the life of their child. The life was taken; someone committed murder, and that was all there was to it. Ever since she’d been aware of the world around her as a child she’d seen this going on, and though it tried to shape her, as it shaped so many of her dear childhood friends—she could barely remember the flavor of life from before the war—somehow she managed to hang on to a sideways perspective. She glanced sideways at Ilinčić, slowing down as she passed by him. He was just as reptilian as he’d been the day before, but this time more morose. She nodded to him in greeting, but he didn’t even blink, staring straight through her. This confused her; she went over to the other side of the restaurant and sat at a table with her back to him, feeling a chill creep up her spine. Then her cell phone rang.
“Are you eating?” asked her mother.
“You won’t believe it, but here I am having breakfast,” answered Nora gently.
“You’re right, I don’t believe you, but so be it. Where have you been? You haven’t called.”
“I’m working on an article, so I’ve been all over the place; I thought I’d give you a call when I got back to Zagreb.” Nora made her excuses. That was mostly how they talked, she and her mother. Not too close but never too far, either. Her mother didn’t want to smother her with concern and burden her daughter with her own troubles, so she kept her distance, and Nora didn’t want to burden her mother, so she told her hardly anything about herself, her real self. At one level their relationship had frozen long before everything happened, which explained the questions about food, warm clothes, weather. Although both of them, through the codes, felt every shade of mood and concern in their relations.
“But where are you, exactly?” asked her mother.
“In Rijeka, something about the shipyards.” Nora sounded relaxed, although she was only a dozen miles from the epicenter of the central trauma of their lives. “How’s Bleki doing?” she added quickly, with interest.
“Oh, like the old dog he is; we just got back from a walk.”
“Just be careful. I’ll call you in a few days; maybe I’ll swing by once this crazy business wraps up.”
“Oh, do; last time he barked at you as if you were a stranger, it had been so long.”
“I will, Mother, don’t you worry.”
“Take care, Nora.” Nora could tell she was about to say something more, but the silence at the other end of the line was replaced by the monotonous, intermittent dial tone. Nora, too, had been about to say something more, but she gave up. She watched her cell phone screen, refreshing it when it went to sleep. Her mother wasn’t one to be harnessed by the system; she fought on alone, the way she felt was right. Every once in a while, people would show up who would encourage her to capitalize on her sterling integrity, but she refused every privilege and asked for only one thing—the truth about her husband and punishment for the perpetrator, especially for whoever gave the order. Nothing more and nothing less, even if it meant turning the world upside down. Lost in thought about her mother, she was distracted by audible whispers among the waiter, the receptionist and, she assumed, the cook. They were gesticulating and shaking their heads, and when they noticed Nora watching them with curiosity they withdrew to the side, conferring with a conspiratorial air. Nora gestured to the waiter to ask for another cup of coffee, but he didn’t notice. He only came over to her table after several attempts.
“Yes?” he said, in a contrite half whisper, clearly wanting to say more.
“Another coffee, please.” The waiter nodded, with such a deeply worried expression that Nora simply had to ask:
“Is something wrong?”
He lowered his gaze even more somberly, as if grateful for the question.
“What?” she added when she saw the game he was playing.
“The mayor,” he said, his voice trembling, and then he stopped and stepped closer: “Our mayor was murdered.”
“What?” Nora rose automatically from her seat. The waiter gestured helplessly with his arms spread wide and shook his head, staring skyward through the ceiling.
“How? When? Does anyone know who?”
“Last night, apparently . . .” As to the rest
of the questions, he merely shrugged. Nora groped for the cell phone in her purse and, dialing her editor’s number, she peered over the waiter’s shoulder. Ilinčić had left, but she knew she would have to stay on in the city.
14.
Garden
teach me how to garden
I need my own garden
now (fall 2010)
It was as if she had all she’d ever wanted. The most compelling illusion that could possibly exist, and it came in the form of white cast-iron garden furniture strewn carelessly about the large, neatly mown lawn around the house. A house in the nicest part of town, not far from the water tower, with a charming view of the river. A branch of the powerful Danube almost in the backyard. A maid. A well-behaved twelve-year-old child who had, fortunately, inherited from her only the shape of her eyes, and a husband she could wrap around her little finger. She could never completely understand his unquestioning devotion and the simplicity with which he perceived the world and life. Barbecue on the Štrand beach, hours in the garage with old motors, and his transistor radio, twice a month in the dark, without fail. This suited her perfectly, and he was of real value to her. Despite this, she’d always predicted this would not suffice, that one day, no matter how things went, she’d find herself on this overpriced, uncomfortable garden furniture, awaiting news from the past that would plunge the entire carefully fashioned illusion about her life into chaos. She seldom allowed herself moments of introspection, but this autumn morning, after she’d given the order to have somebody murdered, she dared call things by their true name. She hadn’t lied to herself with the story that she’d change, nor did she genuinely want to change, although at times she’d stare out the kitchen window with a muted melancholy when her life began to feel ordinary, proper—like when her son was born, or when she picked sour cherries along the edge of her yard to make cherry cordial, or when her husband told her about his problems at work. She felt pricks of grief up and down her spine when she wished the illusion were real, and she felt them again—as she tried to hold on to her life’s harmonious, middle-class façade—when it all bored her. She’d think back on herself as she was before, on her younger years: the zing of a vodka and juice, the fragrance of mornings as they dawned—and now she merely woke up each morning and juggled, split between her external and internal life. She was capable of handling everything, though most of the time she teetered on the edge and could tell that it was only a matter of time before she’d go over it. A part of her knew there was no turning back now that her pure drive for survival was the strongest part of herself. Edgily, she kept refreshing her cell phone screen; the morning was early yet and she was sitting in the garden, drinking coffee, waiting for someone to alert her to what had happened and summon her to an emergency meeting of the city council. She’d almost forgotten about the meeting with the journalist from Zagreb who was writing about the incident with that teacher, Kristina; she couldn’t remember why she’d even agreed to the meeting. This was the last thing she needed now. Within an hour, two at most, all hell was going to break loose. She needed to shake off the journalist. She tried to foresee all possible ways this could play out. She had never doubted Schweppes: if anyone could do it with the truth never coming out, he could. Now she needed to work on the crossword puzzle of the city. The president of the municipal branch of her political party and future candidate for mayor had been positioned for this only recently. He was an inarticulate young technology teacher who’d be easy to manipulate, with modest intellectual potential but highly developed brownnosing skills. The real challenges were the more seasoned figures: freewheeling, self-centered Ilinčić on the one hand and murky Velimirović on the other. With them, her imperative was to create a sturdy but invisible coalition so she could realize part of her plans. One such part was a seat at the head of the port’s supervisory board—not some ordinary membership from which she’d barely get enough to cover her son’s after-school activities—and along with this a directorial position which would allow her to set up her own office and, through it, a tight-knit, trustworthy network. That would do for starters. While she worked on her plans, she thought she could hear sounds coming from the house. When she turned, as much as her curled-up position allowed, she needed a few seconds to connect what she was looking at to her thoughts: a child’s bare feet, unexpectedly white on the gray concrete. She found herself hypnotized momentarily by the purity of skin, which was out of place in this yard and in the world, one of the feet rubbing the other, hopping, until the boy said something. She didn’t understand a word.
“Darko, what are you doing here? Why are you barefoot?”
“Mama, mama . . . Pasha—look at him.” She could hardly tear her eyes from her son’s feet, and when she finally did look up at his hands, she saw a large mound of limp, gray fur and jutting, stiff paws splaying awkwardly around the boy’s nose. The red muzzle was covered in parts by a thick, partially caked foam, and tears were streaming down the boy’s face, shining, mixing with spit, as if he were bedewed with pearls. She leaped up off the chair and ran over to him, trying to push her hands under the animal’s heavy carcass.
“Somebody’s killed him . . .” whimpered the boy, wrestling with her over the dead cat and shoving his nose into the dense fur. Brigita began to shake when she managed to wrench the animal from the boy’s embrace.
We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day Page 11
