Hair Side, Flesh Side

by Helen Marshall

  The nightclub was dark and dingy, just like every other nightclub Jonah had ever attended. They played American music, and served Croatian beer—“Pivo,” Petar informed him, “the only Croatian word you need to know.” The beer came in half-litre bottles, and tasted gritty but not unpleasant.

  The music was hypnotic, and Jonah was still exhausted from jet lag. His belly felt too full, and the beer was very strong. These were people who liked to drink. Liked to drink and fight, Jonah remembered. It hadn’t been that long since the civil war had ended. You could see bullet holes, Petar had said, on the doors in some of the smaller cities where they hadn’t yet rebuilt. And there were villages bombed by the Serbs during World War II that still lay empty and deserted. It was a place for strong beer and quiet faces. When Jonah looked around, there seemed to be something angry and feral to the dancing.

  “The Croatian women are very beautiful, yes?” one of the cousins said.

  Jonah muttered a reply he hoped was polite, but he didn’t really want to talk to this hulking behemoth of a man—family, Deborah had said. Not his family. Hers.

  “Is okay. Very beautiful. You dance now?” Jonah shook his head emphatically. “Is okay,” the cousin repeated, smiling.

  A moment later, Jonah was alone again.

  Disorientated and a little drunk, Jonah took a taxi home alone, hours, he suspected, before the others would be getting in, drunk and grinning, arms hugging companionably around oversized shoulders. When he slipped through the front door, Aunt Katica was there at the little kitchen table, clutching a hand-rolled cigarette.

  She beckoned him to the table, and though he was tired, Jonah did not refuse.

  The smell of tobacco was heavy. Wordlessly, she poured a small cupful of šljìvovica from a plastic water bottle in the fridge. The air conditioner buzzed angrily, but it was still hot in the room. Jonah sipped the liquor, enjoying the sweet, burning sensation it left in his throat.

  “You did not like the club?” the old woman asked him. Her English was surprisingly good, though the syllables still sounded heavy and guttural in her mouth. She didn’t have the high-pitched voices of the cousins’ girlfriends. Hers was harsher; her mouth scowled when she spoke English.

  “It was very nice,” Jonah lied. “I’m just tired after the flight, is all.”

  She grunted in reply, and poured him more liquor. Jonah felt lightheaded. The smoke scratched the inside of his lungs. It had been a while since he’d smoked, something he’d given up when he and Sarah had started dating.

  “Is okay,” she said. “You are good boy. You will do well in this country.”

  He coughed as he swallowed the šljìvovica. She stood, eyeing him, and cracked a window open. A breeze wafted into the room, stealing some of the heavy, circling smoke.

  “I’m not staying long,” Jonah replied.

  The old woman took a long drag from her cigarette. Jonah found himself studying her in the paper-yellow light. Her skin was brown and doughy, a thousand lines creased into the soft folds of it. She hadn’t gone to fat like so many of the other old women in the country, brought up the old way. In fact, Jonah had yet to see her eat. She had simply brought plate after plate to the table, and then observed as the family sat down to dine.

  “It was a woman, yes?” she said after some time. “A woman from your country?”

  Jonah nodded, feeling uncomfortable. “She’s gone now.”

  She took another drag, and Jonah wondered where all the smoke had gone, whether it was pooling in her lungs. Finally, she exhaled a small cloud. “We have many ghosts here,” she said with a soft snarl. “The young people can be foolish in their forgetfulness.”

  “It must be hard.”

  “Yes. Very hard in Croatia, for a long time.”

  She extinguished the last of the cigarette in an ash tray, and then rose to shut the window again. Jonah watched the red ember die to ash, while Aunt Katica looked on in thoughtful silence.

  That night, Jonah dreamed that he was hungry. A woman sat on the other side of a table, but there was so much food piled between them that he couldn’t see her face properly. He began to eat and eat and eat. Dumplings, cabbage rolls, roasted chicken legs, breaded pork chops. His stomach pressed against the table, curving overtop and spilling onto the plate. The more he ate, the closer he felt to seeing that figure on the other side. Soon, he knew, soon.

  Finally, as Jonah felt his stomach begin to burst, he heard a voice, Sarah’s: “I can’t watch you doing this to yourself.” But when he saw who was on the other side, she wasn’t alone. Aunt Katica sat next to her, sucking on her cigarette, eyes burning like red-hot embers as she watched him.

  “You must eat,” she said. “Is good.”

  And she pushed Sarah onto the plate.

  Jonah couldn’t help it. He was so hungry. He took one of her pale, manicured hands and he popped it into his mouth, crunching down on the fingers. Soon he had eaten his way to her elbow, but Sarah only looked on with those sad eyes of hers. “This won’t make me love you any more,” she said. And then she gave him a languorous wink, and he imagined her rubbing up against the man at the club.

  He could feel his skin tingling, could feel her pressed up against his insides as if she was wearing him like a second skin.

  “This won’t make us closer,” she said, her words rippling out from his lungs, through his windpipe.

  Aunt Katica nodded, tapped a wooden spoon to her chin, and smiled.

  Deborah and Petar were late waking the next morning, and they grinned foolishly to each other at the breakfast table.

  “I’m not used to drinking like that,” Deborah said. “You Croats must have cast-iron stomachs.”

  “It’s taken practice. At least we excel at something.”

  “In Croatia,” said one of the cousins, “we say we are very good at fighting. Not so good at peace.”

  Aunt Katica gave him a dark look as she set down a pot of hot coffee. Jonah helped himself to a cupful, serving it out with a long, rounded spoon as he listened to the banter. He felt guilty he hadn’t stayed. They all seemed closer now without him. Deborah laughed easily with the cousins, making quick and clumsy jokes in their language.

  They poured another round of šljìvovica—“It’s how we start the day over here,” Petar winked—but Jonah was somehow left out. He didn’t mind. The coffee was sweeter than he expected, and when he had finished it, he poked the dark silt at the bottom and licked the grounds off his finger.

  Deborah gave him a look, and he tucked his hands back under the table, as the others all downed their liquor.

  They ate thick slices of bread, spicy salami and cheese, along with a heaping spoonful of scrambled eggs. The cousins seemed in fine form, nudging each other in the ribs, their appetites unaffected by the apparent debauchery of last night. Deborah looked a little paler, and only nibbled at the food. Aunt Katica stared disapprovingly at her, and Jonah found himself doing the same thing.

  Food was a gift. Food was hospitality. Food meant you were family.

  He hadn’t felt like he had family in a long time. Deborah was great, but the two of them were nothing alike. She was tiny, trim, the kind of woman who went for a ten-kilometre run first thing in the morning. After their parents’ divorce, the family had become fragmented, with holidays so unbearably tense that Jonah had been happy to ditch them in favour of a low-key morning with Sarah, and dinner with her teeming, multitudinous assortment of cousins, nieces and nephews. But they had never been his family.

  Here, though—here he felt a warmth creeping into his stomach, and at one point, Aunt Katica came and rested her hands on his shoulders. They were icy cold, but the touch was kind, a gesture of affection.

  “It’s the dragon’s own weather outside,” Petar muttered. “I wanted to show you the beach today. I guess we can go to the market instead. The Old City.”

  “Pijaca,” said one of the cousins. “Is very ni
ce.”

  It took some time to get moving, but eventually they boarded the tram into town. Even early in the morning, underneath a cover of grey clouds, the sun beat down on Jonah something fierce.

  They passed through the ancient gateway into the Old City. Despite the sun, and the heat, and the sweat, even Jonah was impressed. The ancient fortifications still stood intact after all these years—after a vicious earthquake that had almost levelled the city, and after invasions by Venetians, Turks, later by Napoleon.

  The walls towered over Jonah. There were already a number of people up there, tourists for the most part, remarking at the colour of the ocean, taking pictures of the Adriatic. Jonah felt exhausted from last night as it was. Jet lag tugged at his eyelids, and he felt as if he had eaten a cannonball for breakfast, the weight of it sagging from his stomach. But up sprinted Deborah with her trim runner’s legs, the flesh smooth and expensively tanned. Jonah followed, taking one step at a time. He didn’t like heights much. But when he reached the top, the view really was spectacular. On one side, he could see a patchwork of red clay rooftop tiles jostling one another for space. There were so many different shades: the old tiles, grey where they had cracked and sun-bleached where they hadn’t; a variety of reds, oranges, browns of the newer tiles. In some places, he could make out the bright, coloured tiles where the rooftops had been patched. After the war, he thought. The too-even colours had a bright flesh-over-a-scar gloss.

  It reminded Jonah of the way their apartment in Toronto had looked, the week after Sarah had left. She had let herself in while he was at work to collect all of her things. When he’d returned at the end of the day, exhausted from troubleshooting the glitches in the system he had been working on for the last month, he had found empty craters in the dust on bookshelves and tables where a lamp or vase had stood, nails sticking out of the wall.

  She’d left a note:

  Dear Jonah, sorry to collect my things while you were away, but it didn’t feel right to see you. Not yet. I know this is all my fault.

  I left the key in the ashtray on the kitchen table.

  Sarah

  Perhaps all loss felt like that, empty places where you knew something special, something important, had stood.

  Traversing the walls took a good hour. Jonah sweated through most of it with a fairly good temper. Deborah and Petar often asked him to take cute-couple pictures of them kissing. Each time, Petar would open his mouth, like a fish, to suck on Deborah’s top lip. They fit together like two gears turning, mouths clicking together, camera clicking to capture the shot.

  Finally, they found themselves in a large plaza filled on the one side with two-person tables where tourists reclined, drinking pale beer out of enormous glass mugs. On the other side, the square was filled with stalls perched under rectangular, blue and white striped umbrellas. The bustle of people was ferocious and Jonah was almost immediately swept away from his group by the crowd. There were enormous watermelons bulging out of crates, tomatoes, cucumbers, limes, olives, eggplants, bunches of bananas, and strings of garlic hanging from the rafters.

  He made his way to a huge statue with large, bronze panels on it that stood in the centre of the square. The panel before him depicted a dragon and a winged lion bowing before a woman on a throne. It was beautiful, and imposing, a relic of the ancient spirit of Dubrovnik exerting itself against its would-be enemies. Libertas, Jonah remembered, was the motto of this town. It had never let itself be conquered, not by the Venetians who ruled the rest of Croatia nor the Turks, their ancient enemy.

  But Jonah’s gaze soon swept back to the lines of burdened stalls. Where had the others gone? He tried to shade his eyes and get a better look.

  “Try, yes?” called out a slender woman selling giant wheels of cheese. She shaved a piece off a crescent and offered it to him. Jonah, without thinking, put it into his mouth. “You try, yes? Try all!” She cut off more from something darker, an orange-yellow with a red skin to it. He took it. And the next piece, and the next. He tried to put his hands up apologetically.

  “No more, no more,” he pleaded, and disentangled himself from the booth, offering twenty kuna to satisfy the woman.

  Where were Deborah and Petar? He thought he spotted Petar’s head towering over the crowd, and he tried to wade through the crowd to rejoin them.

  Someone tugged at his arm.

  It was a small child, shirtless, nut-brown from head to toe like all the Croats. His eyes looked up with an eager expression on his face. In his hands, he clutched a thick slice of watermelon, which he held out before Jonah. He did not resist when the fruit was pushed into his hands. He bit down, felt the juice running over his chin.

  Then there was a girl, fifteen or sixteen maybe, in a knotted white dress. She came up to him shyly. He still held the green rind of the watermelon in his hand, so she leaned in close and pushed some kind of sweet pastry into his mouth.

  “No,” he whispered. “I don’t need it.” But she simply smiled and fed him another. He dropped the shell of the watermelon.

  There was another hand. Something dark with a thick, aromatic juice was pushed toward him. And then a red sliver of tomato.

  Jonah had barely closed his mouth, barely chewed. His stomach felt tight against his shorts. It bulged out under his shirt. He tried to protest, but there were so many hands, so many offerings. He couldn’t stop. He felt his mouth unhinge like a snake’s, as meat and cheese slid down his gullet almost effortlessly.

  “Alklha,” he heard them whisper. “Alklha.” He didn’t know what the word meant, but it didn’t seem to matter. The marketplace came alive before him, a thousand tanned hands and smiling faces. He was fit to bursting, but his hunger was deep, so deep. It was as if he had never eaten in his entire life. Jonah could feel a fire beginning to burn in the pit of his stomach, a fierce joy, protectiveness, something like love even, for these people and their gifts. I love you, he wanted to say. I love you all.

  The chatter grew louder. There was quite a crowd of people now, all those dark, brown eyes staring up at him with hopeful, expectant faces.

  It was then that the nut-brown boy—the one who had first offered him the watermelon—was pushed to the front of the crowd. His eyes were bright, shining, his skin smooth and youthful, long-limbed. He would be a handsome boy one day, barrel-chested like the cousins. He slipped his short child’s fingers into Jonah’s mouth. They tasted sweet, sweeter than anything Jonah had ever tasted before. The boy pushed further, and soon it was his whole arm, and then a leg, and then both legs, so that the boy was sitting on the edge of Jonah’s jaw, half in, half out. He didn’t seem scared. In fact, he seemed happy, excited. Jonah couldn’t speak. His throat began to work, constricting in tight circles that caught hold of the feet and dragged them deeper into his throat.

  And then the people were pushing, pushing the boy further into him. Jonah squeezed his eyes shut, caught somewhere between the fear and hunger, the moment dreamlike in its intensity.

  The boy’s head disappeared, and then, at last, the final hand slithered between his lips.

  Jonah felt heavy now, terribly heavy.

  The crowd was dissipating, all those happy, faces blending back into the dull morass of hot, sticky tourists and bored vendors. The bright white and blue of the tents were blinding. Jonah found himself slumped on a bench, half in the shade, his stomach sagging pitifully over the belt of his shorts. He felt queasy. His vision blurred. The sun was too hot, and he could feel prickles of sweat running down his neck.

  Deborah and Petar appeared, as if out of thin air. Deborah sat down on the bench beside him, while Petar peered off, his hands shading his eyes. The cousins ringed them like an entourage.

  “You don’t look well,” she said, her voice laced with concern. “Maybe you should go lie down?”

  Jonah nodded his head, moaned something low.

  Deborah put her hand on his wet, sticky back. The gesture was so intimate,
so familiar, that for a brief moment Jonah felt tears at the edges of his vision.

  “One of the cousins can take you home,” Deborah said softly. “Petar wants to show me the harbour. It’s supposed to be beautiful. Do you want to come . . . ?”

  Jonah shook his head. There was an intense pain in his abdomen. He felt hot and sleepy, fevered. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, a cousin had propped him up under one arm, and they were walking toward the tram.

  “Sorry about this,” Jonah muttered. “I hate to spoil your day.”

  He looked up, and the cousin was smiling a tight, sharp smile. Jonah recognised him as the one from the bar, the one who had sent him fleeing back to the apartment. At that moment, he didn’t care though. He didn’t think he could make it back on his own. Another wave of pain overtook him, and he almost doubled over with it.

  “Is okay,” the cousin said. “Alklha. We wait for you.”

  The air in the apartment was thick with the growing heat of the afternoon. Jonah was sweating profusely now, his shirt almost soaked through. At one point, he half-dreamed he saw Sarah in the kitchen, but when he blinked his eyes, it was Aunt Katica, clucking sympathetically, while she poured a glass of cold tap water for him. She wore a green printed dress, and for a moment, Jonah was glad it was her there and not Sarah. When he had got the flu, she had locked him in their shared bedroom with an electric kettle, a small jar of honey, and a box of Twinings teabags. Not much of a caregiver.

  But when Aunt Katica put her hand to his brow, he felt something blissfully cold slither down his spine. “You rest now,” she said firmly. “Grow strong.”

  The bedroom felt smaller today. Jonah’s belly heaped like a mountain under the cover. The walls were so close on either side that he felt he could reach out and touch them.

  Sleep was difficult coming, but when it did, he saw Aunt Katica staring down at him from an enormous height. Her cigarette tip glowed in the darkness like a third eye, and Jonah found himself enwreathed in delicious smoke. He breathed it in, feeling it travel through his veins, bringing a rich wave of shuddering heat to the tips of his body.