“Thank you,” I said.
“Please keep cooking,” he urged, and I returned my attention to the ground meat, releasing it from its container into a glass bowl.
“At some point we were put on another bus. I slept and slept, so much that when we finally arrived the doctor at the camp told my parents that I must be kept awake for at least twelve hours every day. He was concerned I would enter a fugue state.”
The flame beneath the flattop on the stove lit blue, flashing into red.
“A fugue state,” I repeated.
“You lose all memory of your identity and behave strangely. People in fugue—fuguing, doctors say—flee their families and disappear. Sometimes they are found years later, living entirely different lives. A married businessman in Zurich may fugue into a cattle farmer in Spain. Most are never found. Many, I imagine, die.”
I put the beef in a frying pan, added chopped onions, turned the burner on high. I crushed a clove of garlic, two. Tossed them into the pan. “How did you stay awake?”
“They did it by playing Danish talk radio day and night. They never turned it off.”
His eyes saw past me, above and beyond my body. “The camp was a big institutional place. Rows of long low buildings. Everything white linoleum or cheap wood. We were given a tiny antiseptic apartment where everything had been scrubbed bare. We prepared and ate our food in giant communal kitchens. We were allowed to play where we liked, within the fence. But adults could not work, nor were they given language classes, which is now standard for new arrivals. It was as if we had moved to the strangest, saddest apartment complex in Yugoslavia.”
I took the head of romaine and chopped it crosswise. Found a stick of butter, rubbed it on the pitas. “Your apartment in Sarajevo sounded beautiful,” I said.
He laughed, one note. “Yes,” he said, shaking his head. “Yes. The camp was not a place any of us could make our own. The Danes decided that the best way to prevent Balkan violence from carrying over was to indiscriminately mix the displaced people together. Serbs and Croats lived there, too. The camp was tightly controlled, so there were few fights, but the tension was almost unbearable. The war had come on so quickly that none of us had gotten used to hating each other. I kicked a deflated soccer ball around a parking lot with other faceless boys, and it would be fine, unremarkable. Then, as if a switch was flipped, I would notice the small differences—their accents, the little pendant icons of the Virgin Maryam some of them wore, the soccer teams they followed—and be filled with a terrific fear, a fear so strong I thought that I would wet myself.
“Other times, instead of fear, I felt anger. Violence. Whatever I felt, when the switch was flipped, I simply fled without a word. Ran back to our apartment and closed myself inside a closet. Waited for my breath to return in the dark, for my heartbeat to calm. This was how my reputation began, you see; even among the refugees, I was odd, a misfit. And in that closet is where my story began. My lovely imaginary sister, my tragic murdered cat. Heroics on all sides, a cunning escape by bus rather than the hired car that took us to the airport well before it was closed.”
I shivered, turning to look at him. His eyes were on the table, wide, as if he were reliving those hours, his child’s body in the closet.
“What did your parents do in the camp?” I asked, wanting to pull him out, to save him the little bit that I could. “Did they know what a hard time you were having?”
Zlatan shrugged. “They were suffering too. If they noticed that I often ran into the apartment and hid myself in the closet, they said nothing. But I think they didn’t notice. My grandfather took to drinking rakia all day long with some old Bosniaks who brewed it in their apartments, although this was against the rules. He had never been much of a drinker. He hadn’t tasted beer until he was in his forties. But in the camp, everything changed. My grandmother, a cosmopolitan lady in Sarajevo, became in the camp a nattering old woman, one of a clutch of hens that camped out in the communal kitchen, chain-smoking all day as they gossiped about which women were sluts, which men wife beaters. For the first time in her life, she began to wear the hidzab. She said she had been called to greater religiosity, but I think she merely wanted to fit in with her new friends, harpies with closed faces without a nice word for anyone.”
“Zlatan, what’s a hidzab? A hijab?”
The meat was done. I turned on the oven, put the pitas inside. I found a grater, made it rain cheese. Put the meat in a bowl, arranged the lettuce on a plate. Chopped the tomatoes.
“Yes. The head covering. May I help you?”
“It’s okay.” I took the pitas from the oven. “Everything’s done.”
“I’ll do the dishes, after, then,” he said, departing for the next room. “I suspect you have had your fill of housework.”
His words invoked that just-past me, a stung spirit haunting the pale hallway between the kitchen and the room where Søren and I had slept. I could see her sweeping and wiping. Slinking back to bed to touch herself and cry.
I followed Zlatan into the other room. We sat across from each other at one corner of the table. He arranged silverware and blue cloth napkins, pouring glasses of water from a tall glass carafe.
He watched me assemble a makeshift taco and then raised his beer. “To you.”
“To you,” I repeated, lifting my bottle. We smiled at each other.
My food tasted real, immediate, part of the known world. Not a thing given to the past but made from the present. With deep satisfaction, I watched him eat.
When the first resounding pang of fullness hit, I asked, “Did you start school immediately?”
“No,” he said. “It took some weeks, maybe months, I am not sure. Initially the Danes thought, as we did, that our situation was short-term. Everyone believed we would be back in Sarajevo by New Year’s Eve, then by the first day of spring, then by the summer solstice. We were becoming indigent in the camp. Older boys were forming groups that without intervention would have become gangs. The seclusion was so different from our lives in Yugoslavia. There, we had the world; in Jutland, we had only the camp. School was necessary but I was not prepared for how difficult the transition would be.
“We were given special tutors, but the policy was for refugee children to attend regular classes with Danish students in their age group. So I was thrust into classrooms where I couldn’t understand anything. In Sarajevo we had learned about the history of our city and country; in Denmark, children learn about the history of this country, its glorious past as an imperial power, its dominance of millions of people. The successful conquest of Greenland, where the natives dissolved into alcoholic despair at the first sight of Dannebrog.” He trilled the flag’s name. “The language came to me in pieces over the course of an excruciating year. Now I recognize how quickly I learned, but at the time I felt I was barely keeping my head above water.
“Most of the other children ignored me, but a few took special joy in tormenting me. Every day that boy Daniel followed me on my route back to the camp with his pit bull, a wretched beast that snapped at me on his command—”
“The scar on your chest,” I said, seeing it through his shirt.
“Yes.” Zlatan looked up now. “Who can account for the cruelty of children? It comes from a deep place, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Later I became aware that Daniel’s parents had their own problems. His father was a petty thief, his mother a terrible drinker. His elder sister had cerebral palsy. The dog had been bought to protect her from her own bullies, who were crueler to her than he was to me. But this knowledge did not protect me. I did not feel better when, three years later, I went on to university while Daniel ended his education completely.”
“You went to university?” I wondered why I had not known this, and then I wondered why, how, I possibly could have.
“Yes. I have two degrees in forestry.”
“I don’t mean to be surprised. I don’t know why I’m surprised.”
“We have only just met,” Zlatan rubb
ed his hair.
This unavoidable fact. It kept being true, no matter how much we told each other. “Keep going.”
He folded his hands on the table and smiled, squinting at me. “I am not sure how much more there is to tell. Eventually, after some years, we were moved from the camp into a small flat in Aars. My father began his work for the skovrider before that, so he continued in that job. My mother never returned to work.”
“Is forest rider really what your job is called?”
“That is the official title. My official title.”
“It sounds medieval.”
“It is a medieval term I think. Maybe ‘woods magistrate’ is a more accurate description.” Zlatan laughed. “My father enjoyed the work, as I do. It sustained him through his divorce from my mother. Through my grandparents’ deaths. They died just a month apart. They knew they would never return to Sarajevo. As did my mother.” He shook his head. “My father is still alive, which is more than any of us could hope for. He lives in Vejle now, with his second wife, a Dane. She has her own money, so he no longer works. They like to go to estate sales. In the summer they take package vacations to Majorca. It’s funny, there is a place in Bosnia just a letter different from Vejle, Velje. Like a mirror image.”
He stopped talking. We sat with our empty plates.
“Thank you,” I said awkwardly. “Let me do the dishes.”
Zlatan shook his head again. “Allow me, Roxana. Go and run the bath.”
3
ENTERING THE IMMACULATE BATHROOM FELT PROFANE. The bath’s faucet, a sleek chrome stripe, was flanked by knobs cast in the shape of the negative space inside a human fist. I plugged the tub and twisted the left knob, releasing a heavy stream of clear water. I held my fingers under it until it warmed, pricking my ears for Zlatan, but I could hear nothing above the rush of water. I closed my eyes and dropped my hand into the tub, imagining his movements around the kitchen. Rinsing the plates and setting them in the wooden drying rack beside the sink. Wetting a towel and wiping the table clean, knocking the crumbs to the floor, where they would stay overnight before he vacuumed and destroyed the last evidence of my time in his house.
My mind went back. All my scrubbing of Søren’s uncle’s apartment had failed to impose the order that held easily here. In trying to show him what was inside me, I had instead offered an amnesiac surface, reflective enough for Søren to see his own hated face. The tub had filled almost to the rim with boiling water. A delayed burn shot up my arm. I cried out.
“Roxana?” Zlatan stood naked in the doorway. “Stand up,” he said indulgently and undressed me like I was a tree he was tending. I stared at him, trembling as he unzipped my coveralls and pulled them down and over my feet. He bent and kissed me on the top of my head hard, like a punch, before sinking into the tub.
I put one foot in the water. “It’s so hot! How can you stand it?”
He smiled. “When you have been very cold, hot water is always lovely.”
I climbed in, willing myself not to wince, and sat between Zlatan’s legs, pressing my back into his chest. His member sleepily poked my coccyx as he closed his arms around my shoulders. For long minutes we sat silently cooking, my skin flushing mauve. I watched my toes and fingers wrinkle. My back slid against Zlatan’s body, petted by his damp chest hair. I slept, or something like it, as the bath slowly cooled.
When I came back to myself, the water had turned Zlatan hot pink. He let me see him. Then he turned my body in his hands and brought his face close to mine. He pressed his left hand against his chest and his right hand between my breasts and kissed me, a mash of color behind my closed eyes.
Zlatan washed me with a great yellow sea sponge soaked in mint soap, cleaning the easy parts first, the slouch of my tummy, my swollen breasts, my smooth thick thighs, my back. He lifted my arms and sponged beneath them. He made me stand and washed between my legs, holding my labia apart, careful not to push soap inside my body. He turned me around and washed my ass until it tingled.
When it was my turn, I was not so gentle. I scrubbed his body industriously. I separated his toes, which made him giggle, frothed suds in his armpits, shaped his chest hair into a sodden heart. I rubbed his feet and hands until they squeaked. Then I stood him up and sponged his thicket of pubic hair, washed his penis, remembering the lost motion of pulling back Søren’s foreskin. I pulled Zlatan back down into the bath and threw my arms around him, pressing my chin into the hollow above his collarbone.
I love you, I said in my mind. I love you I love you.
Eventually the water grew cold. Zlatan loosed himself from me and undid the plug. We stayed until the tub was empty, clutching each other as the drain took its shuddering last breaths, our own breath shading in and out, the white ceramic shining all around us.
We walked into the bedroom still wet from the bath, holding hands, and we lay down on the bed. I stared at the ceiling, bracing myself. Zlatan put his hand on my waist and I pushed my thumb into a light bruise on his throat. Had I done that? Whatever we were moving through was also moving through us.
Desire lit in my chest. I gripped the cleft of his buttocks and threw my leg over his hip, kissing him deeply. For a while it was simple, a salve on my body’s aches. No frenzy, only a contentment one shade away from sadness. Then he broke our kiss and held my face in his hands. I saw his pores, my own tragicomic expressions of pleasure reflected in his clouded eyes. Our clutching embrace, our struggle for dominance, the payment for silent passage to a space of prophecy where we were observed by the expectant faces of the dead.
Words bubbled in my throat. I had to tell Zlatan that I loved him, to promise. If I failed, we would tilt and keel, moor-less. I would lose him and be alone. An opaque pearl grew inside me, whiting out the room, the bed, his face, my face, my voice. We were only bodies.
“Don’t move,” Zlatan whispered, with an edge I hadn’t heard before. I opened my mouth to speak, releasing a kind of rattle. “Don’t speak.”
He tightened his arm around my torso and moved his other hand behind me. His cock presented itself, pressing the cleft. With his two longest fingers he roughly sought me, parting my pubic hair and stroking my bared labia until it became slick and pliant. His breath wet against my neck. I tried to turn my head to see his face and he shook his head against my nape. He’s going to take me from behind, I thought, liking and not liking it, but I was wrong again. He brushed his lips against the back of my neck and kissed the space between my shoulders, moving down my spine and crisscrossing my back with his wet mouth until I moaned into the pillows.
Those diagrams I had pored over for hours came back, the exotic names of my parts ringing through my head as he worked on me. The tender boundary of the perineal raphe, the frenulum of labia. Names like orders of nuns. Vestibular fossa, vestibular gland, I do not know what you do but you live inside me, on me, you demark the regions of the happiness of my body. Labia majora, labia minora, now gently parted by his tongue. An entire architecture of pink depth. Above, the Skene glands, the urethral opening, and now the clitoris itself, turned over and over in purple shapes against his face. I sat up. The fantastic beauty of shape and form went on and on, until he pulled away and rested his cheek on the rise of my sex, nuzzling the hair with the moist lower half of his face. He turned me over, flipped my body between his hands, and kissed me between the legs from behind. I slid my fingers into his hair and made a fist.
His hands held me open so he could slide in. With an almost involuntary movement I began to push back against him, seeking the hard rebuke of his body. He pried me apart and with one thrust entered. Rode me hard, his arm tight around my chest, a harness. I let my body go limp and tried to concentrate on the feeling of him inside me, the harshness of it, of being full and then not. His tempo quickened. He brought his hand to my front, cupped my pubis. Pulled up.
I waited for the purple and gold to come, but all I saw was the light beginning out the big windows. The shadows of leaves, of trees. Zlatan began to speak hi
s language, louder and louder in the dark room, until finally he was shouting. As if we were fighting and he was winning. The feeling came. Pleasure diffuse as loss. My smoke surprised me, sneaking in, at first almost an afterthought. Then I was nothing in its grip.
Zlatan’s eyes were slits. Burning danced up and down my back and arms and legs. I rolled us over so that I was on top. He tried to sit up, but I held him down.
“Roxana,” he said. “Roxana.”
I wanted to say his name, too, but my words had not come back to me.
The scene became darkly familiar: the beautiful room, the lovely man who wanted me to open him and take his blood. I bent and bit Zlatan on the neck as hard as I could. He did not resist.
I leaned back. He pressed his hands on my distended stomach. I saw his face. He needed me.
The razor blade he had used to shave lay on his bedside table, inches from my thigh. I closed my hand around it. He watched me, his eyes narrowing and widening.
I curved over and pressed my mouth to his in another kiss, and then in one darting motion, as if I was lancing a boil, I pressed the thin skin above his clavicle with the razor’s tiny edge until a bead of blood appeared. A stain. When the red bloomed, I dropped the razor. His eyes opened wide, but he did not pull away.
I pressed my mouth to the wound.
Purple smoked all around us.
He held my hips so that there was no space between us.
Everything metallic, the edges peeled back.
Blood in my mouth like flight.
He cried out.
I saw stars.
We drifted back like falling snow.
I put my hand on Zlatan’s neck, covering the wound. “I hurt you.” I started to cry.
Zlatan lifted his arm, wincing. “Come here.” I scooted to his sweat-slicked body, lay against his chest. The cut’s angry eye flashed in my periphery. “Why are you crying?”
“I have to tell you—” I almost said it then, the sound already on my tongue.
Zlatan drew me closer. “Don’t.”
Open Me Page 22
