We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day

by Ivana Bodrozic

“I ordered Ilinčić’s murder,” she said, enunciating every word. Grgić froze. His eyebrows knit, his mouth sagged open.

  “Come again?”

  “I ordered Ilinčić’s murder,” she said with the same quiet.

  For a time Grgić stared at the floor, then he sighed and looked up.

  “Why?”

  “Because he killed my father,” she answered with complete self-control.

  “Good god . . .”

  Nora sank into the chair and let all the weariness of the world wash over her.

  ÄÄÄ

  Boy from the water

  water falls

  on your eyes the color of honey

  I’m the boy from the water

  with track marks under my arm

  The building of the bridge, celebrated with pork cracklings, brandy, and a circle dance on the muddy ground, had begun six years before; the ground was broken by the communications minister at the time, who announced that this was a vital traffic artery and a crucial part of the government’s plan for the accelerated construction of a network of ring roads and interchanges connecting the state roads, highways, cities, airports, and commercial zones throughout Croatia in an effort to give the country a competitive edge. Three years later, the work on the one-thousand-foot-long four-lane colossus was completed. The builders could only access it on ladders, right up to their last day on the job. The bridge had not yet been opened to traffic because there were no roads leading to it in either direction, as if somebody from outer space had plunked it down over the river, hedged in by meadows and brambles on either side, as precise as a blunder. Fifty million kunas had been poured into the concrete structure. And to make any sense of it, with roads leading to it and from it, they’d now need five times that much. Nobody had a clue about any plans for the future. Meanwhile, instead of roads, mountains of construction waste piled up on either side of the bridge, dumped there, mainly asphalt but also other types of rubble. The high-priority project had turned into a scrap heap, and nobody except scavengers ever went there anymore: a few years back they’d harvested all the drainage grids and the copper grounding wire. The people living nearby complained that their houses had been flooded three times that year because of the bridge. The backstory to the bridge to nowhere included, among others things, the Golubica restaurant, owned by Ilinčić’s sister, since the highway exit ramp was supposed to run right by it. There was also a vacation community where Ilinčić had arranged a weekend cottage for himself—all part of the plan for a modern artery that would link the city to the highway for Zagreb. The work was halted because a new minister took office. The investor ran short of funds, and the bridge was abandoned, suspended there magically between heaven and earth.

  He left the car, with the key in the ignition, on the path by the meadow. Night was falling as Marko made his way through the brambles. His feet were soaked, and he tripped over holes in the soggy soil, while the bridge kept seeming farther away. After a half hour’s trudge he finally reached gravel, stepping around large chunks of rubble. He climbed up onto the bridge over which no car had ever driven, onto the asphalt that shone in the moonlight, mirroring the dark, star-studded sky. Partway across the span he sat and lit a cigarette, stared into the black water beneath him, and remembered a summer’s day at the pool many years before. He recalled his friend and his friend’s younger brother, Dražen, who went missing that day. The first day of the end of the world as he knew it. He suddenly saw the figure of the scrawny little boy that muggy afternoon; all that was left behind were his wristwatch on the towel and his gnawed peach pits. They searched for him till morning, draining the pool dry, they split into groups and for days scoured all possible places around the city, suburbs, woods. He was also at his friend’s house when the police came to the door a few days later and their mother’s wails rang out from the living room. Something was crushed in them then. Individually, as a generation, universally. They gawked at each other, baffled by life and the forces arrayed against it. Every warm and carefree image of their shared childhood, from the community around them, the innocence they shared was seared on that day, never to return. Not long afterward, the war began. Then an endless nothing. And then Nora, and a past that never ends, then Ekatarina Velika, the music he always returned to, then the song “Love,” one more magnificent ruse of life after his existence in the safe haven he’d built for himself by giving up. And in the end, the black, black water, like the beginning and end of all things. A circle. He stubbed out the ember of his cigarette onto the thousands of grains of sand encased in the concrete of the bridge to nowhere, breathed deeply once more, thought about the boy, then about himself, then her, and dropped into the water.

  23.

  This is the country for us

  this is the country for us

  this is the country for all our people

  this is home for us

  this is home for all our children

  now (fall 2010)

  “Darling . . . my little darling . . .” she whispered, squeezing her fingers in her own, “my little girl . . .” Nora pulled her hands away, and her mother snatched them back and pulled them to her, wanting to hold on as long as possible, forever, bringing her face to the wet knot of their fingers.

  “Don’t, Mama,” said Nora flatly.

  “What have they done to you?” she asked, expecting no answer. After turning herself in to the police, Nora was remanded to detention, where she was held for a month on the suspicion that she’d organized and ordered the murder of Josip Ilinčić, city councillor and respected local politician. Since she’d confessed to her guilt, the investigation wrapped up quickly, and Nora was sentenced to live out her life at the women’s prison in Požega. She reached her mother after she’d admitted everything. She hadn’t wanted to see her until then. She didn’t want to see her now. There was no longer a heart there to be broken, but she knew her mother’s desire. In those last few months, Nora’s mother had lost twenty pounds and aged twenty years. They knew everything yet didn’t know what to say to each other. Time was passing too slowly for Nora, too quickly for her mother. The prison policewoman retreated to the farthest corner of the room, immersed in her cell phone.

  “I am sorry I wasn’t strong enough,” said her mother, staring at the floor.

  “Mama, this is not your fault; you did the very best you could.” A note of tenderness in Nora’s voice now.

  “If only I could shut my eyes, Nora,” she said as she crossed her hands and looked upward towards the ceiling.

  “It will pass, Mama, everything will pass . . .” Nora stood up and signaled to the policewoman. She nodded and started over towards them. Her mother leaped up and threw herself on Nora, and they stood there like that for a few seconds. And then Nora scraped her mother off of her in pieces that scattered all over the gray linoleum, and nobody would ever be able to collect them again. She went out into the corridor that led to the cells. She no longer felt anything; she was completely free. On her way down the corridor she suddenly spotted familiar light eyes. Kristina was walking toward her and, when she saw Nora, an expression of surprise flashed across her impassive face.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, astonished.

  “What does it look like?” said Nora. They stopped, and the policewoman let them.

  “Huh,” smirked Kristina, not expecting any further explanation. “Well, well.” She nodded, almost with sympathy. “It’s not much worse than outside, once you get the hang of it. The same maniacs, the same rules . . . just less space . . . And your right buttock gets stronger than your left when you go out for your walk, because they always have you walk the circle in the same direction . . . And you use a lot of water when you’re on the toilet, too much. There’s no privacy, so everyone runs the tap so others can’t hear it when you’re taking a shit. But . . . people do that outside, too, don’t they?” Kristina patted Nora on the shoulder.
Nora just nodded. There was something perfectly precise in Kristina’s universal truths about the outside and inside worlds. There were many more years for her to ponder these things, to fashion her stoicism, learn not to wish for more than what was given. The policewoman hurried her along to her cell, and Nora obeyed her without a word. She stepped in and the door closed behind her. She’d be able to manage. After all, there was nothing more for her to do, nor did she need anything. She was prepared to make her peace with everything. Nothing was so terrible anymore, except maybe for one thing: realizing you can’t open the door from the inside.

  Translator’s Note

  Images of “holes” and “pits” pervade this political thriller. Indeed the title of the novel in its Croatian edition, Rupa, means “Hole.” The city of Vukovar, referred to only as “the city” throughout, is one such hole; the pits into which the victims of the massacres were thrown during the eighty-seven-day siege are another, as are the wounds of the people of Vukovar.

  Vukovar is situated at Croatia’s easternmost periphery, across the Danube River from Serbia. During the 1990s, ex-Yugoslavia was rocked by a series of savage wars. Early on, in the fall of 1991, Vukovar was besieged by the joint forces of the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serbian paramilitaries; the siege reduced the Baroque city to rubble, and when the paramilitaries and army forces broke the siege and swarmed the city, they massacred hundreds of people, most of them Croats. These massacres served as the basis for three of the trials held at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, two of which never reached completion due to the deaths of the defendants.

  After they broke the siege, a Serbian territorial authority asserted control and occupied the city; only after lengthy negotiations in 1998 was the city reincorporated into Croatia during the period known as the “peaceful reintegration.” At that time, many local Croats moved back to their Vukovar homes and were reinstated as the majority community, while the community of Serbs who stayed on to share Vukovar with the returning Croats were accorded minority status. To this day, the elementary and secondary schools are segregated: the Serbian schoolchildren are taught according to the curriculum used in Serbia, while Croatian schoolchildren follow the curriculum used throughout the schools of Croatia.

  In Croatia, Vukovar and the siege have become a tragic, almost sacred, symbol of the war, but because the city is far from Zagreb, Croatia’s capital city, the country’s focus is elsewhere most of the time. We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day provoked a raging controversy after it came out in 2016 because it exposes the venality, the cynicism, and the tragedy of Vukovar—and, by extension, of the people of the former Yugoslavia generally, a tragedy that can no longer be ascribed to an external enemy.

  All the titles and epigraphs at the beginning of chapters and sections within chapters are from songs by the Yugoslav band Ekatarina Velika, also known as EKV. The band’s sound, themes, and feel are reminiscent of the Velvet Underground and Nirvana. They are one of the last Yugoslav bands before what had been Yugoslavia until 1990 broke up into eight successor states, so these songs represent a precious poetic document for Nora’s and Marko’s generation that was lost in the vortex of the war, displacement, emigration. Here are the songs, with their original titles, so interested readers can find them online:

  “Hands”

  “Forget This City”

  “Someone’s Watching Us”

  “The Real World around Me”

  “Moving Toward”

  “Years of Lead”

  “We’re Sinking”

  “Be Alone on the Street”

  “Like It Used to Be”

  “She and He and He and I”

  “Money in Hands”

  “Into Darkness We Run”

  “Blue and Green”

  “A Few Years”

  “Circle”

  “Time to Cleanse”

  “Eyes the Color of Honey”

  “Cold”

  “The First and the Last Day”

  “Garden”

  “Hunger”

  “People from the Cities”

  “The Ghetto”

  “Hey, Mama”

  “Synchro”

  “Just a Couple of Years for Us”

  “You Are All My Pain”

  “Dum dum”

  “Platforms”

  “Weary”

  “Love”

  “Boy from the Water”

  “This is the Country for Us”

  “Ruke”

  “Zaboravi ovaj grad”

  “Neko nas posmatra”

  “Stvaran svet oko mene”

  “Kad krenem ka”

  “Olovne godine”

  “Tonemo”

  “Budi sam na ulici”

  “Kao da je bilo nekad”

  “Ona i on i on i ja”

  “Novac u rukama”

  “Bežimo u mrak”

  “Modro i zeleno”

  “Par godina za nas”

  “Krug”

  “Treba da se čisti”

  “Oči boje meda”

  “Hladan”

  “Prvi i poslednji dan”

  “Vrt”

  “Glad”

  “Ljudi iz gradova”

  “Geto”

  “Hej, Mama”

  “Sinhro”

  “Par godina za nas”

  “Ti si sav moj bol”

  “Dum dum”

  “Platforme”

  “Umorna”

  “Ljubav”

  “Dečak iz vode”

  “Ovo je zemlja za nas”

  Ellen Elias-Bursać

  Cambridge, MA

  About the Author

  IVANA BODROŽIĆ was born in Vukovar, Croatia, in 1982, where she lived until the Yugoslav Wars started in 1991. That year her father disappeared while fighting for Croatian independence and she and the rest of her family moved to a refugee hotel in Kumrovec. In 2005, she published her first poetry collection, The First Step into Darkness, and in 2010 her acclaimed and bestselling first novel The Hotel Tito, which won three major awards in Croatia and the Prix Ulysse for Best Debut Novel in France. It was published by Seven Stories in 2017. Since then, she has released her second poetry collection, A Crossing for Wild Animals, and a short story collection, 100% Cotton. We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day is her second novel and her first political thriller.

  ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAĆ translates fiction and nonfiction from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. She has taught in the Harvard University Slavic Department and is a contributing editor to Asymptote. Her most recent translation for Seven Stories is Robert Perisic’s novel No-Signal Area. She lives in Boston.