17.
The ghetto
fog combs a lock of hair on the street
a cold breath from the west
now (fall 2010)
Every morning he bought four editions of the dailies in the two alphabets; he’d get into his car, drive to the bus station; sometimes he’d have an espresso at the counter in the bistro, and then he’d read the papers till noon if there were no customers. At this time of year the city was a mecca for cemetery tourism. Retirees, groups of hungover soccer fans, nursery-school children who were brought here in training to become society’s future victims, professional patriots, foreigners: every fall they came pouring into the city to visit the massacre sites. They sniffed the air as if expecting to smell the blood, surveyed the lay of the land to gauge what the topographical difference was between an ordinary meadow and a mass grave, scowled with suspicion at the greenery of the grass, examined spots where the ground was bare. On their faces one could read gratitude for their own better fortune, mingling with the excitement of observing without participating. With a gasp they saw the geometrically arranged white stone crosses planted in the green grass as in American movies, and like mesmerized children they shook their heads in awe, admonishing one another with wagging fingers and umbrellas, reading aloud from the memorial plaque: the youngest victim was six months old, the oldest one hundred and three; a pregnant woman was shot in the belly, shot in the belly . . . in the belly, uh . . . rang out like an echo reverberating from the wobbly double chins and waterproof rainjackets purchased for just such excursions. At first he drove his taxi from mass grave to mass grave but refused to take tours to the pit. Until one morning when he spotted two young women speaking in English at the bus station. This was just when the site of the pit was being turned into a war memorial, and when Marko had only twenty kunas to his name. He needed another thirty if he was going to tank up on gas. The place was on his mind every day, and he knew he would have to go back there sooner or later. He went over to the women and inquired, discreetly, if they needed a lift. One of them didn’t understand his question, presumably a foreigner, while the other said yes and asked how far to the pit. When he heard this he shook his head, thinking to beg off, but there was something in her eyes—something elusively dark and dry, so lost that it couldn’t be more lost, something which gave him the feeling that he owed her and himself the trip to the pit. He sensed there was something that bound the young woman to that place, even if she’d never been there; he sensed that everything in the world depended on her going there. He could tell that it had to be him, that the moment had come.
“If you have thirty kunas, I’ll take you. I’ll have to stop at a gas station along the way,” he said, eyes fixed on the ground. The woman took out a fifty and pushed it into his fist without waiting for change. Her foreign companion merely followed the transaction with animated eyes, only intuiting that something serious was going on here, such as, for instance, that somebody from the family of a person who had possibly been a victim at the pit was paying someone who had possibly been an executioner, a former reservist, to take her there. Not knowing, observing the taxi driver’s attempt to redeem himself while knowing there was no way he could. When they got out of the taxi at the makeshift parking area, he stayed in the car, indicating with a glance that he’d wait for them. They walked away to a spot about a hundred feet from where he was parked. He watched the back of the foreign woman in her green jacket and stole glances at the face of the other woman. Between the two of them were about three feet of dirt and 250 dead bodies. The face of the young woman shattered into a thousand pieces while she shrugged her shoulders, doing what she could to answer questions in foreign words about something that couldn’t be explained in her own words. Through the clouded windshield he could see in her eyes a pit filled with embarrassment and the desire to get through this as soon as possible. He froze that image in his mind, and in a ritual that night before he fell asleep he hammered it into the inside surfaces of his eyelids.
That morning he went right by the newsstand near his building without buying the papers, passed his car, and walked on into the center of town. He hoped he’d run into Nora somewhere; he wanted to call her, though he knew he never would. It had taken less than twenty-four hours for her face to start appearing before him no matter where he looked. He stopped at a newsstand in the center of town to buy his papers.
“Yes, neighbor?” asked the vendor with her frizzled yellow hair, peering out through the little window and looking at him only briefly. He piled up the papers and slapped down what he owed her without a word; she went on drawing him into conversation.
“We’ll still be reading about this nightmare tomorrow. Who knows what really happened, and what the reporters will cook up next.” She gave him a conspiratorial look, and this caught his attention.
“What?” he asked, to be polite.
“What? Where have you been living?” she shot back in an almost scornful tone, a little hurt that only now was Marko interested in the important information she had to impart.
“I’m not up on the news, neighbor, what happened?”
“The mayor’s been murdered, that’s what happened. No normal life for us here.” She wagged her head, aware of her importance as the person with the breaking news.
Marko stared at her, incredulous. “When?” he asked, joining the conversation—something he almost never did.
“Last night. And a junior reporter was killed too. They’ll be coming after us, one by one . . . No normal life for us . . .” The vendor repeated her mantra.
“Thanks.” Marko picked up his newspapers and went on toward the pedestrian zone.
He sat on the terrace across the street from the café where he and Nora had spent the evening. Only then did he notice that there were more police in the city than usual. The day was cool, so he was the only customer sitting outside on the damp, bare chairs; the waiters hadn’t yet put out the cushions. He logged on to the Internet sites of the newspapers, where he learned no more than he’d heard at the newsstand, but he was almost certain that Nora was still here for now. He went a few times into the list of contacts on his phone and the same number of times out of it, downed his coffee in a gulp, shot to his feet, and strode off toward his car, which he’d left parked by his building. All this will pass drummed in his head. What mattered was to feel nothing, and if he did feel something, to do nothing, because all this will pass, regardless. He walked mechanically through the streets and reached his car in three minutes, and in another two he was at the bus station. The bus was just pulling up, and there was always somebody who needed to be driven to somewhere on the outskirts of town, because city buses were infrequent. He was lucky and picked up a retired couple whom he drove, for the cost of two bus tickets, to an outlying village. He didn’t make any money from the fare, but at least he was on the move. At least, while listening to them, he could evade his own thoughts. Docile, toothless old folks who didn’t have much time left—but that didn’t keep them from quarreling hotly over their opinions. He glanced a few times at the rearview mirror as they squabbled loudly, each looking out their window. Clearly they’d spent their life together and no longer had the need to look at each other.
“Well, for him, I’m telling you,” insisted the granddad.
“I doubt it.” The granny was unwavering.
“Where the hell did he get a house that size? Come on, you tell me,” he pressed.
“He earned it; did he go off to Germany to work, or what?”
“Earned it my foot. They’re all saying he worked at whatever; if he’d gone to Germany he’d still be there. They wouldn’t have locked him up. No, he smuggled people. And children.” The granddad was exposing the head of the village, who’d just been locked up.
“Well, a person’s got to make a living, what things you . . .” Granny wouldn’t allow anything to tarnish her picture of the world, or the image of her neighbor
who had a big house, three tractors, and embroidered curtains on the windows. People always had to have something to cling to. Marko didn’t know whether he was struggling more with his thoughts or with the two of them and their vision of the world. When he finally left them out in front of a gray, unplastered house, he went to the gas station on the edge of the city. While he was paying, out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a man at the other cash register whose face he wasn’t sure if he was seeing or not, because since the night before, the past had begun pouring in through all the holes in his subconscious, and all the dams were giving way. Only when the heavyset, smooth-shaven man, more or less his age, gazed for a moment longer than necessary at Marko’s face did he remember with a quiet chill the unopened bottle of whisky, and the life he’d saved so it could go on wreaking havoc.
18.
Room
in an empty room someone’s things
dirty love in stains
now (fall 2010)
After the first terse sentence Inspector Grgić gave the journalists in the hotel foyer, telling them there’d be no information or statements regarding the murders, the grumbling of the dissatisfied locals and two or three bigshots from national television spread through the room, just as he’d anticipated. He gestured to them to let him continue.
“We understand the public would like to know what has happened, and they have the right to be informed. We have called you here to tell you whatever we can,” he went on, shifting his weight in his chair.
Then he explained that because these were cases of special interest, he had the leeway to inform them of the victims’ personal information, which would otherwise be held back from the public, and as soon as circumstances so allowed he would be doing just that. He filled in with phrases that said nothing, because there was nothing further to say. He confirmed that both the mayor and Nikola Vrcić, junior reporter, had been killed the night before. After being called in, the police had blocked access to the areas, and today there would be heightened surveillance of vehicles and drivers.
Traces taken from the places where the murders happened, both the mayor’s apartment and the site where the body of the junior reporter was found, had been sent to the Center for Forensic Investigation, and findings were expected in the next hours or days. With the help of the findings they hoped to discover who had committed the murders, and then, perhaps, who might have ordered them.
“I can tell you that quite a large quantity of material evidence has been collected.” He coughed significantly, knowing that his “quite a lot” had no basis whatsoever in reality. “We are waiting on the forensics. Everything suggests that what happened here was a complex act, requiring a complex investigation,” said Grgić and added that the investigation was now in the purview of the county attorney’s office, and he was confident the cases would be solved.
Sitting in the front row, Nora waved her hand in the air the whole time, and though he’d said at the outset that because of confidentiality concerns he would not be responding to questions from the press, as soon as he finished his last sentence and began putting papers into his briefcase, Nora spoke up in a loud, assertive voice.
“Can you at least say whether you suspect that the two murders might be linked in some way?” Grgić looked in her direction and said wearily: “Miss, you weren’t listening to what we said at the beginning . . .”
“I was, but this truly is in the public interest.” This time Nora was not backing down.
“For now we have no such indication,” he said, using a textbook phrase, hoping in the same breath to express his thanks and sidestep any further discussion.
“Has anybody requested police protection?” She quickly jumped in again.
“There have been no requests for police protection.” He punched each word, already irritated. The rest of them followed Nora’s example, and the questions came raining down one after another. Someone who’d watched one too many episodes of Midsomer Murders mentioned “the perfect murder,” which prompted thinly veiled irony in Grgić’s voice. He explained that hypothetically every murder which has as its goal the death of the victim is perfect as far as motivation is concerned, but the police believe there is no such thing as a perfect murder. After this he rose abruptly to his feet, nodded, and hurried out of the foyer. The journalists soon began to disperse, and Nora looked around, hoping Brigita still might turn up, although by then it was reasonably clear that she wouldn’t. Perhaps she’d known this already that morning; maybe she’d have left Nora in the lurch regardless. Soon Nora was alone; the room around her had emptied, the diligent waiters were already folding the chairs. Her mind was working at a mile a minute, but she hadn’t formed any conclusions. There was no obvious motive for either of the murders of the night before. A chill ran down her spine when she realized she’d been in the vicinity of the consulate just before the time of the murder, and somewhat later she’d been near the apartment of the murdered mayor. She rose slowly from her chair when she saw that the waiter was standing six feet from her, his arms discreetly crossed, waiting for her to get up so he could tidy the foyer. She decided to go back to her hotel room and take at least two hours to enter on her laptop all the reactions that were racing through her mind, and then arrange them in some sort of order that could help her organize her train of thought. She was taken with anxiety when she realized there were at least two separate files to think about—one for the schoolteacher and the other for the mayor. Although the first was her primary assignment and the reason she was here, she had almost no desire to go near it. But there was no way to avoid it; she’d have to take a deep breath and write what was expected of her. She walked back to the hotel, staring at the ground, concentrating on every detail she could remember having to do with the mayor’s case. The port? Everyone knew he was a wreck after the recording had been made public, and furthermore was politically dead, though he kept trying to play the victim. So why kill him physically as well? He no longer had any sway or power. On the other hand, at least according to what she’d been able find out, the murder was committed far too professionally for it to be a crime of passion. Those crimes were almost always gory and messy, and were the work of those closest to the murder victim. In them there was always love which had turned to hate. They weren’t deliberate, just as love itself is never deliberate, and that was why the killer always left such a mess behind, and why the people or things around them suffered the consequences. Occupied with those thoughts, she reached her room, but as she entered she took a step back to check on the brass number affixed to the doorframe. This must be the wrong room. She didn’t spot her things on the table and chair; they weren’t where she’d left them. When she’d made sense, after a couple of seconds, of what she was looking at, and when she saw that the number on her key and the number on the door were one and the same, she realized somebody had been there. Somebody had definitely been in her room. Someone had smashed the chair, overturned the desk, pushed one of the beds over, and flipped the other over on its side. Nora’s clothes were flung around the room, tossed over the bed and window, over the cupboard door, and on the floor. She reached for her things, but as she picked up each item of clothing, it fell to pieces. The sleeve fell off her T-shirt, the legs off her pants; all of her clothes had been sliced up with scissors and left in heaps of scraps. Then she froze, midroom, when she remembered her laptop. She couldn’t even tell where to turn to look for it. She’d left it on the bed, under the blanket, but the blankets were on the floor and the beds were laid bare. It was gone. She broke out in a cold sweat and was paralyzed by fear. Walking backwards, she slowly left the room. She closed and locked the door and then ran down to the front desk. Nobody was there; the only sound was the radio softly humming, shattering the silence.
“Hello!” she shouted nervously, leaning over the counter. No response.
“Hello!” she called even louder, and from the depth of the dark corners of the hotel appeared
the receptionist-waiter.
“Yes, Miss, where’s the fire?” he asked with a prim smile.
“Somebody broke into my room and stole my laptop; all my things have been thrown all over the place; who went up there?” she blurted out in a single breath.
“What? Impossible.” The waiter shook his head, grinning, hyenalike, with his yellowed teeth.
“What do you mean, impossible? Go up yourself; it’s as if a bomb went off in there! Somebody must have heard!” By now she was yelling.
“Calm down, everything will be fine; we’ll resolve the misunderstanding. Slow down.” For a moment Nora went mute, and he continued. “Perhaps you misplaced something; you came in late last night, perhaps you don’t remember everything . . . and a small room can become messy in no time.” The expression on his face was a mask of concern.
“I’ll report this to the police. Please, I beg of you, don’t let anybody go up there; I want the inspector to see it. I now have lost everything I need to do my job; do you understand me?” She had the impression that he didn’t understand or was pretending not to. She dashed out of the hotel, running as fast as she could, and within two minutes she was out in front of the police station. Traffic had been blocked, and there was a crowd out in front. As she tried to push her way in, people were filming the uproar on their cell phones. She didn’t have a chance to figure out what was going on, but out of the corner of her eye she noticed a policeman and a local person, arguing.
We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day Page 13
