We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day

by Ivana Bodrozic

  “Where are you going?” A man in a uniform stood in front of her, scowling and serious; he’d been watching her ever since she came running across the street.

  “Please let me in, I need to report a robbery,” she said in all seriousness, but the policeman didn’t seem to be taking her seriously.

  “You’ll have to step away; apparently a protest without a permit is starting. Come back later.”

  “How can I come back later, whatever could you mean, my things, my laptop, they’ve all been stolen.” She was on the verge of tears. The policeman slipped his arm through hers and led her to the back of the building. At the back entrance he asked for her first and last name.

  “Nora Kirin,” she answered, looking him straight in the eyes.

  “Little Miss Kirin”—he leaned over to her ear—“if you go straight down there and then to the left, that’s where the inspector is, and he just came in; be careful to tell him everything that happened.” Then he paused, and added, even softer: “A laptop can be replaced. Other things not so easily, as you know so well.” Then he turned and walked away, leaving her alone in the hallway. Nora froze. She thought of her mother, all the police stations where she’d waited in the corridor for her, her mother’s face as they saw her out. She made her way to the inspector’s office. The door was open, and he was not alone. She recognized the coat, the little purse, the lace: Melania Gmaz was sitting across from him. Nora stepped closer to the door so she could hear what they were saying.

  “He threatened him; I saw it with my own eyes,” Melania testified doggedly.

  “He threatened the mayor,” repeated the inspector as he took notes. “And can you repeat what it was, exactly, that he said to him?”

  “That he fucked his mother, and he told the Chinese man that he fucked his mother, too, and that he’d knock him flat and that the fish in the Danube would eat him. Which isn’t actually logical, is it.” This last comment was for herself.

  “What isn’t logical?” he asked, confused.

  “That he’d knock him flat and throw him into the Danube!” She shrugged and looked up, seeking help from above. She’d reported so many injustices and crimes by then that she knew there was little chance she’d be taken seriously, but after the murder of the mayor she knew she had to report what she’d seen. Ilinčić picking him up by the collar in the parking lot and threatening to kill him. She believed unwaveringly in the institution of civil duty—unlike Nora, who wised up that instant. She turned to the exit, realizing she’d been chased into a trap. Ever since her father had been killed, ever since her mother was never allowed to initiate an investigation, ever since, after nearly twenty years, she’d come home. She knew there was no way to handle this with kid gloves. She took a deep breath and steeled herself, this time, to deal with this differently. She took her cell phone from the back pocket of her pants, went into her contacts, and clicked on the letter M.

  19.

  Hey, Mama

  hey, mama, what’s your son doing

  hey, mama, who is there with him?

  hey, mama, fear for his life?

  hey, mama, he’s done wrong

  now (fall 2010)

  The barrier arm blocking access to the parking lot wasn’t lifting; he began honking nervously so the guard, who as usual wasn’t in his booth, would finally let him in to park by the national library in Belgrade. The morning light refracted from the crosses on the Church of Saint Sava, in the droplets of water spraying from the fountains around the church; it shone on the beggars and Gypsies, tourists and monks, on the smudged windows of the cars snaking through gridlock in the surrounding streets. Illuminated by surreal autumnal light, a morning that no longer felt like the day when he was to receive yet another literary prize, this one emanating from the warm embrace of novelist-cum-politician Dobrica Ćosić. These laudations had been easy to come by. His face was unshaven, the bags under his eyes reached down to his knees, and his eyelid twitched uncontrollably while he waited for the lowly creature in a gray uniform to come along and press the red button. He checked to see what his eyes looked like in the rearview mirror and saw red. The color of the previous night was black. Well, red at first, the red of the traffic sign with the white circle. Red announcing he shouldn’t drive the wrong way down the one-way street; he drove into a side street that he thought would take him out to the main road and the hotel. Then came the color black, darkness, the moment when he shifted the car into reverse, having changed his mind, calculating he’d be better off ignoring the red traffic sign and driving down the street the wrong way anyway. There was nobody out, after all. He glanced back over his shoulder while driving forward. When he pressed his foot on the gas to traverse the short one-way street as quickly as possible, the Volvo gave a wild lurch, noise; no color then. A thud or a bump. Noisy and fleshy, and, he could tell, alive and so fragile. And tossed to the side. He stopped for a second; his heart almost vomited, the sounds of applause and the shrill women’s voices still ringing in his ears. In panic he peered around. Should he get out and check? Suddenly sober. He thought of pulling it into the car and taking it to a forest somewhere nearer the border with Serbia. He considered the pits and water wells in adjacent villages. The Danube and the toothed carp. And how this would never occur to anybody. But death is contagious, and when he pictured the corpse in his car—first on the front seat; no, even worse, in the back; oh, definitely not in the trunk—he realized he couldn’t. He wasn’t that man. And then he thought tenderly of himself and his precious life, and again he pressed the gas. Godnar drove to the hotel in a total trance; later he had no recollection of the drive, that was the black, the hole that engulfed everything and left behind only fear for his skin or ass, depending. He swept up all his things from the room, found himself in the parking lot, and then remembered his ID card and almost shat himself while he waited at the front desk of the hotel for what seemed like an eternity, listening to the hollow instrumental music. He only came to while waiting in the access lane, a few hundred feet from the border with Serbia. He remembered he hadn’t even examined the hood of his car up close to see if there was any damage. Luckily, the damage was minimal on such a big, sturdy chassis. For the first time in the last two hours he felt a welling of sincere joy and no trace of shame. He was only the tiniest bit sheepish about the very lack of shame he’d felt.

  “Good evening,” he said heartily while staring at the square-shaped light by the little gray box of a booth. The border policewoman didn’t return his greetings. Without a word she took his documents and peered into his car. Her tired gaze danced from her screen to the plastic card and traffic permit, then returned them to him a few minutes later, and he slowly crossed the bridge, driving in second gear, holding his breath, and drove up to the next border agent. An even smaller metal booth, and as he slowed, a man’s hairy arm was all that emerged and waved at him to pass. He nearly choked with joy.

  Taking care to respect every single traffic regulation, driving every minute below sixty-five, he was in the Voždovac neighborhood of Belgrade within two hours, elated and trembling in his big, warm bed. He didn’t feel at all as if he’d just killed a man and fled the scene. A man he’d hugged only hours before, promising him a big interview for the next issue of Izbor. As he commented in an aside about the icy reporter lady with the little, poetically brazen tits, he realized the Izbor reporter was gay, and this put him off slightly, but still he liked the man. The different things that happened the night before had nothing, as far as he was concerned, to do with each other. He felt no guilt. Indeed, he felt as if someone had given him a new lease on life. For two difficult hours he slept the sleep of the dead and woke up early, before dawn, while the chaotic city of Belgrade was bathed in gray-lilac murky light. At first he didn’t think of all that had transpired; then he broke out in a cold sweat only a few minutes after waking. He jumped up and put water on for coffee, opened his laptop, and began scrolling for news. Nothing yet.
He entered his name, and there wasn’t even a word about the poetry reading. Maybe, after all, the man hadn’t . . . He kept refreshing the page as morning dawned and then began readying to go and receive the award. He was wide awake by then, and reality had begun to sink in; he was queasy with fear of possible evidence. Having arrived too early, he first parked in the official lot of the library and then wandered the foyer, reading the posters on the bulletin board. Below his photograph and the announcement about the award ceremony there were notices of labor-union discounts available to library staff for the purchase of bedding and Zepter cookware. This seemed somehow pitiful, somehow tawdry, somehow unfair. He couldn’t imagine why everything around him had suddenly gone so rapidly downhill, why people had no teeth or souls; there was something false in everything around him. That very thought momentarily appalled him. Like the many others who were wandering around with him, there was no mobility to his neck, and his gut was hard as a rock. He’d never stopped to look left or right, never back, only forward, avanti, ahead, straight into the fragmented stupidity which allowed no forward movement. He had no soft core, only a terrible, rigid, stonelike gut, preventing him from crouching, squatting, down to the point where everything begins. All he knew to do was to march onward, especially over those who couldn’t stand, and from the heights he couldn’t hear the joints snapping and the flesh rotting. He had no past, he knew nothing of it; all he had were images, until he simplified them to the point that they became comprehensible, ordinary, and comforting. Climbing the steps to the great hall, he stared at the thick, heavy curtains that had enshrined the vast windows for almost forty years, inscribed with writings from the gospels. He remembered his grandfather, Miroslav, and an incident when he and his grandfather had been traveling by train while he was still a very small boy. The train had stood for a whole eternity between Ruma and Šid when a woman poked her head into the compartment to ask whether they knew what had happened and why they were standing there so long. The old man said nothing at first, but when he exhaled a cloud of reeking smoke from his endless mouth, staring out the window, he simply said: runover. Without a blink. Things like that were always happening everywhere. Godnar strode into the hall; the people rose to their feet and applauded.

  ÄÄÄ

  The special session, open to the public, had been scheduled to start more than a half hour before. The journalists and camera operators were buzzing around in the hallways, and the deputy to the mayor who’d been killed the night before—more recognizable for being the only person in a gray suit than for anything else—was seeking, with his gaze, the support of at least some of the members of his political party on the council so he could call the session to order. Almost all of them, at least in the first rows, stared at the floor or straight ahead. In a shaky voice he called on those present to hold a moment of silence. The hall was filled with the noise of metal chair legs scraping on the parquet floor, until all the representatives were standing. The week before, when the mayor had shown up at a session unannounced, at the moment the municipal budget was voted down by one vote, they’d also averted their eyes. At the time he’d been on sick leave, waiting for the state attorney’s office to initiate proceedings, and then he’d ended up having a surgical operation that was presented by the opposition as the most ordinary sort of excuse spun to the press. As the meeting was about to get underway, he’d come charging into the hall, tripping over the camera cables and microphones, and torn off his suit jacket. His voice had cracked as he unfastened the buttons on his shirt, ripped away the bandages and gauze with trembling fingers, and displayed the fresh scar from his recent heart operation, when he’d had a pacemaker implanted. There were sutures—as black as disease—protruding from the swelling, blistering skin, and to the council members, until only yesterday colleagues and friends, he’d offered to pull his heart from his body so as to cut short the speculation in the media about him feigning illness. Ashen and rumpled, he’d glared straight at Brigita, who was sitting in the first row, while she fixed her gaze on the pile of papers before her. Soon after this performance, the decision was adopted to hold new elections, costing the city—with one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country—another thirty million kunas. Now again she fixed her gaze in front of her, while all she could see before her eyes were Darko’s bare feet and the foam from the cat’s snout dripping down them.

  “Please take your seats,” announced the mayor’s deputy after a full minute of silence. Nobody needed to be asked to be quiet; they were all waiting for him to speak, in hopes that they wouldn’t have to.

  “First”—he coughed, visibly shaken and smoothing his thinning hair across his head toward his ears—“may I express my grief at this indescribable tragedy, and then my sympathies to the family, friends, and colleagues of our late mayor. I hope the police will do their job as quickly and efficiently as possible so we can bring stability back to the city.” The councillors nodded in sympathy. The deputy paused, drumming his fingers on the table and swaying slightly in place, and did what he could to gain control over his voice. “Until then, we can’t do much, can we, under these extraordinary circumstances. Over the next days we’ll set the date for the new election, and until then technical matters will be handled as usual. Allow me to dissolve the council in its current form, and thank you all for your service.” He nodded and sat back down. The councillors soon started fidgeting, turning to one another and whispering. None of them were in any hurry to vacate their positions, either literally or metaphorically, though judging by the recent developments and imminent election, it was inevitable that some of them would be leaving their seats on the council. Just as it was clear that what with the growing poverty and upsurge in nationalism, the next election, after a pause of only three years, would be won by a coalition of right-wing parties. At the same time a major drama was brewing among the representatives of the minorities, because the founders of ethnobusiness who’d reigned supreme for many, many years were finding themselves, for the first time, on unsure footing. Velimirović was still thriving at the national level, inching his way gradually toward the Croatian parliament on Saint Mark’s Square in Zagreb, but among the locals there was growing discontent with the way in which he had represented their interests. The vast wealth he’d amassed over the last years was in inverse proportion to the despair and neglect of the surrounding, mainly Serbian, villages. Feelings ran especially high after rumors circulated that at his new wife’s insistence he’d signed his own daughter up for school to follow the Croatian instead of the Serbian curriculum. Better that the kid had two hours extra every week of French and piano, instead of Serbian language and culture classes. And besides, once Dad won his mandate as a deputy to the national assembly, she’d be attending secondary school and university in Zagreb. And it wouldn’t do for her to be so far behind her peers in school. What was the point of learning about the Battle of Kosovo, anyway? Velimirović could only agree, while in public he continued fiercely to defend the model of ghetto schooling by which the children of Serbian nationality were taught according to the curriculum used in Serbia. He was constantly raising a ruckus about how parents, under threat to do so or by taking the easy way out, were forcing their children to assimilate as if they were the new kids on the block. Privately, he knew full well that children who’d gone through the Serbian school system while living in Croatia would not have equal opportunities, but he successfully bartered with peoples’ emotions, drives, and myths, as much as the situation allowed. The voices against him were growing more determined, and he had his eye on Councillor Arsovska more often now, greeting her with courtesy in the hallways. He was waiting for the right moment to approach her.

  “No need to feel awkward,” he said softly after the final session, approaching her from behind and brushing her elbow in passing.

  “Pardon?” Sincerely surprised, Brigita turned to Velimirović.

  “Oh, you know, I meant about all this.” He knew she was a savvy woman, but he w
as wondering whether she’d feign ineptitude, and to what degree. Many eyes were on her; the mayor’s dizzying plummet had followed after her report, and word had it that she’d destroyed the man’s life by recording him, when all the rest of them were doing the same things, the only difference being that there were no recordings of their dealings.

  “I’m not feeling awkward at all, don’t worry; I feel sorry for him, like everybody else does. That I reported him for bribery has nothing to do with all this,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes.

  “Of course it doesn’t; I didn’t mean to insinuate, I just want you to know you have my support.” He was being discreet and equivocal.

  “Thank you for that.” Her first thought was to shrug him off politely, but then suddenly this didn’t seem so useless and pointless, the support he was allegedly offering. Even if her party were to win the election, their victory would probably be a close one, and every hand would be welcome. Far too fresh in memory was the way her party had been savaged for its transformation into a criminal organization brandishing the red-and-white checkerboard flag, its far-reaching devastation of the economy, the thefts of unheard-of magnitude under the banner of social welfare. On the other hand, also fresh in her memory was the former prime minister, currently in prison, who, the Christmas before last, when he found the special coin in his mouthful of the traditional bread served at Serbian Christmas, shouted the Serbian Christmas greeting, “Christ is born!”—a rare move of his that was not a disgrace. And if he could make that concession, maybe this here wasn’t so unimaginable.

  “Now there will be chaos; who knows how long this situation will last . . .”

  “Yes, I hope everyone will be reasonable; that would be in everyone’s interest.” They uttered these hollow phrases while looking at each other, eyes shining. At that moment, in the spheres of the unsaid a new coalition was born, formed based on a pure, unsullied hunger for power. While wrapping up the formalities, Brigita spotted a young woman who was staring at her intently, standing by the door. She assumed this must be the journalist she’d said she’d meet. She’d have to walk right by her; no longer could this be avoided. She went over to her, and before Nora had a chance to say a word, Brigita said: