I looked for only a moment, determined to be calm. It could end at any time. He could cease, withdraw, close the door on the golden sliver of light. I would have to do this without flinching.
Remember this, I told myself. Remember.
I walked to Geden and pressed my mouth on his, steadying him with a hand at his nape. My tongue painted his, lighting him up before I even got to the roof of his mouth. I felt him rise against me. His plant smoke smell and a third flavor I could recognize. Chocolate. I took his hand in mine, interlacing our fingers, squeezed. We went on like that, falling together and apart, until there was no air left and we had to separate to breathe. How sweet, I thought, dizzy, and I grabbed his cock as hard as I could.
Purple spots flashed in my eyes. Geden cupped the back of my head. I leaned into his arm. His green eyes filled with emotion. Fear? I did not want him to fear me.
His pink lips moved in their black cloud as I lost consciousness.
When I woke it was evening. The leaves on the trees in the long windows had turned cobalt, amethyst, evergreen. I lay beneath a wonderful blanket, a real, full-size duvet layered under a beautiful blue quilt embroidered with yellow stars. Four pillows were arranged around my head, exactly as Mama always did.
Mama. Her face.
Where was I?
I reached behind the pillows, felt a carved wooden headboard. I couldn’t remember where I was, but I wasn’t frightened.
I looked down. I was in my clothes, my shirt buttoned up to the top, my pants pressing the impression of my fly into my stomach. My feet in the black socks with the hole over the left toe. Søren came to me in a clear diving bell, ash eyebrows, straight back. My wrist still bore his red cord. I untied it and slid it into my pocket.
My boots were missing. There was no armoire or dresser that might conceal them, only the windows, two white walls, and one of smooth blond wood. I sat up, releasing another gust of dizziness, and swung my legs over the side of the bed. My heart rate accelerated. Black. Black and purple.
A man appeared in the far corner of the room, carrying a wooden tray, and it swam back in. Geden. The pond in the park. His truck. His house in the woods.
“I would not get up so quick, if I were you.” He walked to the bedside and balanced the tray in one hand, shooing me with the other. He was dressed in a gray sweater and black jeans. I remembered his lovely naked body, the kiss, and blushed, immediately wet.
“How long has it been since you have eaten?”
A few sips of coffee that morning. The night before there had been no dinner. For breakfast the day before, more coffee. Not since the evening of the fight.
The soup smelled wonderful.
“Roxana? I am concerned for you.”
He put the tray down on my lap, unfolding its four short legs. A steaming red bowl held a gleaming yellow soup. Beside it there was a tall glass of water and a bottle of beer labeled Sarajevsko Pivo.
Geden handed me a spoon. “Eat. Do not drink the beer until after the soup is done. It will balance you.”
“Please don’t tell me what to do,” I said, still mad at Søren, wanting everything to be different. Then I was so embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I don’t feel well. Thank you.”
“Yes,” he said evenly and stepped away from the bed. I hoped he wasn’t angry. The soup was lemony and rich, containing in addition to the carrots and parsley chicken with crispy skin surrendering its crunch to the broth, melting onions, and tiny chunks of celery. After a few bites I found another vegetable, okra, my favorite when I was a little girl. Energy ran into my stomach like gasoline. I wanted to go out. I wanted one person who lived here to show me a good time.
“Take me dancing,” I said. “Please?”
He did not laugh. “Finish your soup first. And drink the beer in small sips.”
“Promise we’ll go dancing,” I said and gulped the beer. “Can I have another one?”
“One beer for madam,” he said, considering me. “Dancing. All right. You have my word.”
I bolted the rest of the soup, feeling it warm a path through my body, alternating spoonfuls with swigs of freezing beer, urging the food into my system and feeling myself light up, glow more incandescent with every dose. When the bowl and bottle were empty I raised my eyes to him.
“Thanks for the soup. Now. We had a deal.”
He sighed. “I’ll keep my promise.”
I stood on new legs. “Where are we going?” I wondered if he had something I could borrow. Saw myself tying one of his work shirts over my belly.
“There are no dance clubs worth our time in Arden or the surrounding area, I am afraid,” Geden said. “Nowhere for us to go.” He laced his fingers behind his head. “Unless we drive to Arhus, our best bet is a grim place like Crazy Daisy.” He yawned.
“Take me to Crazy Daisy, then.”
He laughed.
Søren had laughed at me. Why was everyone laughing at me? I felt like crying, which itself felt crazy and made me want to cry even more. “It’s not funny to break a promise.” I pouted.
“I am not going to break my promise. I’m explaining. If you want Crazy Daisy, we will go to Crazy Daisy.”
I felt more than a little unhinged, desperate to follow the bright thread of inadvisable behavior that I knew held my freedom. I tried to do differently than I had before. I didn’t want to be rude, but I couldn’t be perfectly pliant anymore either. “Do you have any clothes I can borrow?”
“Roxana, listen. Crazy Daisy is a vile nightclub, a grim scene. People competing to see who can drink themselves into the deepest stupor. Surely not the place you are wanting.” He scrutinized me, the corners of his mouth tugging upward.
“Surely it is,” I said, already digging through his drawers. “Let’s leave in ten minutes.”
Out we went into the evening. I’d swept my hair under a green bandanna Geden dug from the bottom of a tiny drawer. He tied an ornamental knot at the base of my skull and then produced a kohl pencil from a slot seemingly made for the purpose. I watched him rim his eyes and then I let him rim mine and in the mirror we were weird twins, everything and nothing alike.
He parked on some Plads and led me by the hand to a back door in an alley off the main street. A man stood at the door nodding as we passed over the threshold into a room so hot and loud I almost for a half second regretted my demand.
Terrible music thundered, happy-go-lucky anthems programmed on computers somewhere in Florida or the Eastern Bloc. When my eyes adjusted, I saw we were in a space that looked for all the world like my high school’s black box theater. In every direction people fight-danced, crouching grimaced, their fisted arms stabbing the air in layered swoops. Everyone blond, with skin an indeterminate shade of sunburn or fake tan. Thick white eye shadow and skintight dresses on the women, pressed jerseys and muscle shirts on the men. Geden turned to the bar and turned back to me with a glass of pure vodka. “You will need it,” he said into my ear, stealing a kiss on the lobe.
I downed it as quickly as I could, turning myself in half circles. I wanted to be dizzy. I wanted to be drunk. Geden leaned on the bar, watching me, and then once his drink was gone he came to me. We embraced and then he led into the center of the room. A song different from all the others started just then, tremolo, a woman’s echoing voice, and we swayed into each other like waving palms. With my eyes closed I was on a beach, in sand, turning him into my arms. I took him wide by the right hand and then crept up under his chin and licked and kissed my way down to the collar of his shirt and back up until he coiled me away from him, a release, and the guitarist rolled her solo and the drums came down heavy, thudding again, again. His eyes in the dark like birds.
Back at his house I went into the bedroom and began to unbutton my shirt before he could say anything. By the time the shirt was completely undone he had come into the room and stood close to me. I unbuttoned my pants and pulled them down, my underwear catching, revealing the crack of my ass, so I took it off too in one movement. The famil
iar smell of my body floated up to me, friendly, reassuring. Only my bra remained. I pinched the closure. Let it fall. Saw my body in my periphery. Watched him see me. I wanted him to touch me, but it wasn’t time yet.
We returned to the bed. Geden drew back the sheets and I got in. He walked to the other side and I saw the difference between the way he had undressed for me and the way he undressed now, rhythmlessly yanking down his jeans, slipping one arm and then the other out of his sweater, and for a moment I felt such a loss at the notion of time passing in this never-dark, at the very problem of yesterday and today—yesterday, when he had performed for me, today when he did not. I reminded myself to catch my breath. At least to try.
He climbed in. I tucked my face into the groove between his neck and shoulder and closed my eyes. Geden wrapped his arms around me so that our bodies touched all the way down. His cock awoke at my skin, settled again.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“You no longer wish to call me Goat?”
“I never called you that. I can’t even pronounce the word.”
“It’s all right, Roxana. It is my name in Farsø. How else could you think of me? However.” Geden cleared his throat. The words he spoke next might have been the wind moving in the trees outside. “Moje ime je Zlatan Zlatar.”
“Zlatan.” I tried it out. “Is that right?”
“No one has called me that since my mother’s death.”
My face in his forest of chest hair. “When did she die?”
“Five years ago. She was not old. She had cancer of the pancreas.”
Hot tears spilled down my cheeks, surprising me. All at once I was weeping. I had always been so afraid of losing Mama. Of losing both of them. But they still existed, I thought. We weren’t done with each other yet.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said. “She was your mother. I shouldn’t cry.”
“In the broken world, crying is resistance.” He drew me closer. “I envy you. I have not cried since I came to Denmark.”
“Really?”
His face moved in the dark. “Since the day we left Sarajevo I have wept for nothing.”
I waited for him to say more. When he did not, I asked, “How old are you?”
He wheezed. “Old.”
Was he? I recalled his face. It had lines, and his hands, though clean, had been used for heavy work. But I could not imagine his age. I felt strange, unmoored, captivated. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I was born in nineteen seventy-nine,” he whispered, his tongue catching my ear.
“Thirty-one. That’s not old.”
“You are eighteen. I am old.”
“You do seem older than Søren. In a good way.”
“He will have to learn to be kind to himself in the way that you have been kind to him, after you are gone.”
Gone. Soon I would be gone.
I listened to his heartbeat, feeling easily empty. Taut. Sealed like the chamber inside a drum.
I awoke in another new body. Zlatan sat beside me, nude, reading.
“Good morning.” He closed his book and gave me a long openmouthed kiss. Mint on my fetid tongue. “A coffee?”
I nodded, shy. He rose and left the room, returning with a tall white mug. The coffee, laced with thick whole milk, was the best I’d had since arriving in Denmark.
“Do you have a computer?” I asked.
He handed me a white terry cloth robe. “I will show you,” he said and led me back into the hall.
I hadn’t seen this room before. Three walls of windows and shelves that held hundreds of books. I trailed my fingers along the spines, reading the authors’ names. Nedžad Ibrišimovič, Jakob Ejersbo, Clarice Lispector. The world was full of things for me to read, I realized, and for the first time I felt excited about college.
Zlatan’s library surprised me, just as his perfect English and beautiful house had. Why had I still expected the sleazy Slav so reviled by Søren? Or even a simple man of the earth in a barren shack, living in symbiosis with nature? But Geden and Zlatan were inseparable. One had drawn me, revealing the other.
Dear Mama and Dad,
Hi guys! It’s been a while since we’ve written. I just wanted to let you know that I am really looking forward to being home in a few days! Sylvie is going to stay a little longer, so it’ll just be me on the flight. I miss you both a lot.
I love you,
Roxana
When I returned to the bedroom he was dozing, still naked, on top of the sheets, arms folded behind his head. I put my hand on his concave stomach and he opened his eyes.
2
ZLATAN DRESSED IN THE BLACK LONG UNDERWEAR HE HAD WORN THE DAY BEFORE, OR MAYBE IT WAS A NEW SET. I pulled my pants from yesterday back on, wishing I had brought a change of clothes. He said we were going to the most beautiful part of the forest.
“Wait.” He raised his hand. “It may be muddy, and I think you should not wear your nice clothes.” He opened another of the innumerable drawers hidden in the blond wood wall and withdrew a set of long underwear like his but gray. From another drawer he produced a pair of coveralls, smaller, made from a fatigue-green fabric instead of khaki and much washed. A patch was stitched near the right shoulder: ZLATAR.
“When we first came to Denmark, years before my father received employment authorization, he would take long walks in the forest every day to pass the time. There he befriended the skovrider, Ole, a kind man. At Christmas that first year, he surprised me with my own coveralls, like the ones he wore but embroidered with my name,” Zlatan said, handing them to me. “He knew that in the camp my mother struggled with laundry. Now I was free to get as dirty as I liked, and I loved the coveralls so much that I never took them off, not even to go to school. The other children were thrilled; how easily I gave them something else to mock. But I felt that the outfit made me invincible, that in it I could go anywhere, even back home, which I wanted quite badly at that time.”
He shook his head. “All my poor mother wanted was for me to have a respectable career, to be a doctor. A scientist, a teacher. In Sarajevo, she always reminded me, she and my father were what she proudly called professionals. She managed a laboratory at the Workers’ University, and my father was the editor of a magazine he had started himself when he was nineteen years old. But for the first five years in Denmark they could not work. It took that long for the Danes to realize that we were not going back, could not go back, and then they finally let us leave the reception center—a refugee camp, do not be confused by the polite title—and move into a horrid flat not far from here, in Aars.”
Zlatan handed me a pair of his oatmeal wool socks. “For you.”
I rolled the socks up my calves and pulled on the leggings, the top, trying to think of something to say. Everything was snug. My breasts required a significant portion of the material, leaving a three-inch gap of flesh between. But that didn’t matter. Zipped up, the coverall covered all.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Zlatan.
“Perhaps if I did not immigrate I would have died,” he said, looking past me. He shrugged. “Or perhaps I would be fine, better than I am today. It is impossible to know.”
“I probably wouldn’t have met you, if you hadn’t left.”
He smiled. “Something to be grateful for, then.”
I walked into the bathroom to see myself in the mirror. New acne had sprouted in the crevice below my lower lip. I wore neither bra nor underpants, and I had not brushed my teeth or washed my face in over twenty-four hours. But I saw fresh beauty, newly hatched.
Zlatan wrapped his hands around my waist. “Come with me.”
We laced our boots up over our coveralls at chairs pulled from the great table in the front room. He lifted a backpack, and out we went into the woods around his house, a district of green light and mossy trunks.
“This is Rold Skov, the second-largest forest in Denmark,” Zlatan said. “There are no mountains, nor much forest in this country, and I am
lucky that we were settled near here. When I came here with my father for the first time, I vowed that I would live here one day. Perhaps that is the greatest success of my ridiculous life.”
“How long have you lived in your house?”
“Six years. Before that I lived in a tiny apartment in a misfit building full of suffering people on the edge of Farsø. Addicts, abused women, squalid children. No one worked. I did not have a kitchen, so I cooked most of my meals outside, on a grill. Inside I had just a few things, a bed, an old rug. Herbs hung to dry from the ceiling fan. Probably what you expected, no?”
Shame filled my face. How did he know?
Zlatan laughed. “Do not look so guilty. I know what people in Farsø think of me. My neighbors at the flat hated me because I called the police on their drunken parties and screaming arguments. I am an immigrant, and even worse, an asylum holder, so in their view I should have been grateful for every broken beer bottle in my front yard and every black-eyed woman sobbing on my front porch. There are all sorts of rumors about me. Because I keep to myself no one has ever bothered to learn the truth. Or perhaps I have purposely kept the truth from them.”
The muffled crunching of the forest floor beneath our feet. “You lie to them?”
He held my gaze. “I suppose I do.”
“Why?”
“There is a certain safety in being thought a dangerous international criminal. If Danish women believe that I traffic Bosniak girls through Farsø to be sold as prostitutes, then they will leave me alone at the bar, instead of drunkenly demanding I teach them how to say ‘fuck me’ in Croatian so they can get laid on their next trip to Dubrovnik. If men like Søren believe I am some savage squatting in a cave, then I avoid their token interest and university-funded oral history projects. If I speak to no one, I do not have to bear comments about how articulate I am, how I have changed their minds about Muslims because I drink beer and do not give a fuck about whether or not I eat their pork.”
Open Me Page 20
