I know you, O monsters! Here we are again, face to face, resuming that long debate where we left off.
And you can advance your arguments like muzzles low on the water: I shall give you neither pause nor respite.
On too many visited shores my feet have been washed before dawn, on too many deserted beds my soul has been delivered to the cancer of silence.
For a long time, they looked into each other’s eyes. Then Mirjana slowly moved back, without taking her eyes off Rico.
“My parents were killed three days later. January 6th 1993. The Serbs came to our apartment that evening. We were living in Skenderia, in the heart of old Sarajevo. They refused to leave, so they . . . They were dragged outside, and . . . ‘You can’t transplant old trees,’ Miron liked to say. My father would never have left Bosnia. And my mother would never have abandoned him . . .”
“But why? Why?”
“Why?” Mirjana shrugged. “All those things . . . They don’t matter now. The Bosnian Muslims did the same kind of thing themselves later on . . .”
She lit a cigarette. Rico did the same. They smoked in silence. Sometimes their eyes met.
Finally, Mirjana went on. “Selim enlisted on the first day. I think he may have done terrible things too. Like so many people in Bosnia. Everyone was prepared for the worst, after the nationalist parties won the elections in 1990 . . . Such madness! I’ll never understand it. My father often said that things happen for reasons we can’t work out. It annoyed me when he spoke like that. I thought it was out of cowardice, complacency. But now I understand what he meant. You can’t do anything against things you don’t understand.”
“What about your brother?”
“He took refuge in a chalet we owned in a little village called Pazaric, on Mount Igman. Mico was stubborn too. He wouldn’t leave. Wouldn’t try to get away. That was where they arrested him. They imprisoned him in a gymnasium. For eight months . . . Then they released him. Since then . . . Even Haidi hasn’t heard from him.”
“Is she still there?”
“No. In Croatia. Haidi’s parents are Croats. I spoke to her on the phone at Christmas. She seemed O.K.”
She gave a little smile.
“I called her from a booth. She talked so much, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. ‘Come . . . Come . . .’ she kept saying. I saw the units getting used up, and then suddenly, nothing . . . Silence. I just stood there, staring at the receiver and crying. We didn’t even get a chance to say Happy Christmas . . . Haidi . . .”
Abruptly, Mirjana stopped speaking and looked around her. As if surprised to be there, in that bistro. The place had filled up, and now smelled pleasantly of anis.
“Do you want to eat something?” Mirjana asked. “A sandwich? A croque-monsieur?”
Rico wasn’t hungry. What he really wanted was a pastis.
They sat there talking and drinking—she drank coffee, he drank pastis—until Mirjana decided it was time to go to work. “Turn a few tricks,” as she put it.
“I have debts. You can’t imagine how much it costs, escaping, crossing borders. The most expensive part was getting to Italy . . .”
For the first time, something in her voice didn’t ring true.
“I need the money. There are these Albanians I owe it to . . .”
Rico didn’t know anything about all that. The traffic in illegal immigrants. But what he did know was that that no one ever gave anything on credit to someone in trouble. He wanted to say that to Mirjana, but changed his mind. Another question had occurred to him.
“Who is it you want to kill?”
“Dragan. My father’s friend. He led the Serbs who came to the apartment.”
Mirjana took her face in her hands. Rico thought she was crying, but it was only weariness. The weariness of pain.
“The only time I don’t think about all that . . . is when I’m being fucked . . . I look at the guy sweating, trying to come, and I tell myself his life must be even worse than mine.”
“And when you give him a blowjob, what do you think then?”
He had blurted out the words without thinking, and immediately regretted them. But it had revolted him that Mirjana could think such things. He could never find any excuses for the people who were always bugging him—the cops, the ticket inspectors. He could never forgive them for the way they behaved. That sounded too much like Christian charity. And it was a long time since Rico had last given a shit about charity.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Mirjana’s eyes had blazed with anger. Then they had turned from dark blue to gray-blue.
“You know, I’ll never forget that moment. When the shots rang out . . . I was just coming home. I saw Manja and Miron against the wall. The neighbors advancing. I cried out, ‘Dragan! No! No!’ . . .”
She lit another cigarette, puffed at it nervously, then searched in the pocket of her coat, took out a pistol cartridge, and held it out to Rico.
“I picked one up . . . Just one.”
Her voice was ice cold. She placed the cartridge on the table, between them.
“They can’t humiliate me more than I already have been. All the rest of it . . . The guys who fuck me are fucking a corpse. Never forget that, Rico. I died too. You know, Dragan was my godfather.”
“Is that why the photo’s been cut? Did you cut it?”
“Yes.” She pouted in disgust, then flicked the cartridge so that it rolled across the table toward Rico. “But I can’t get his face out of my head.”
Back in the shop, Mirjana went to the toilet to put on the clothes she had been wearing the night before. They hadn’t said a word to each other since leaving the café. When she came back into the room, with her make-up on and her hair brushed, Rico was rolling up his sleeping bag.
She looked like another woman. He couldn’t help giving her the once-over. More closely than he had done the night before, in that sinister bar. But with different eyes. Loving eyes, if the word still had any meaning for him. And he didn’t like this woman.
She put on her jacket.
“You like me like this, don’t you?”
“No, not really . . .”
“Oh? Why not.”
“You should keep your beret on. I think it suits you.”
“Oh, do you?” she said, surprised.
“Yes, I do.”
They were both embarrassed now.
“Will you stay another night?”
17.
ETERNITY ONLY LASTS ONE NIGHT
After Mirjana had left, Rico felt lost. He stood there, helpless, in the gloom of the shop. She had asked him to wait for her, and he hadn’t had to wait for anyone—especially a woman—for years.
On the street, waiting wasn’t a problem. On the contrary. The more time you wasted—begging, or finding something to eat, or trying to get hold of a document—the better it was. Rico and the others had more time than they knew what to do with, and all those hours to get through in a day were too much for one man.
But here . . . The wasted hours would be gone forever. They would never return. Rico knew that. He knew his days were numbered. His days here, with Mirjana.
“What are you thinking about?” she had asked him straight out.
They were still in the bistro. Mirjana had managed to persuade Rico to eat something. They had ordered a cheese omelette for him, and spaghetti Bolognese for her. And a pitcher of local red wine.
“About you. About meeting you.”
“And?”
He had shrugged. “It was strange, what you said last night. That sentence . . .”
Mirjana had closed her eyes and repeated, in the same tender tone, “‘I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other . . .’ It’s from a novel by an American writer, but I can’t remember who . . .”
“What I can’t get over is that you should remember it when I was there, or because I was there.”
Mirjana’s eyes, suddenly huge, had turned the color of the sky. Rico
wanted to dive into them, let himself be carried deep inside her, to whirl around in her body and in her heart. That would have been easier than to put his thoughts in order and find words to express them. Easier too than to be forced to speak.
The more time passed, he had realized, the more difficult it was becoming for him to express himself. To construct sentences and put them in a logical order . . . His vocabulary was shrinking. Sometimes he didn’t even get to the end of what he was saying. He would search for a word, not find it, and lose the thread of his thoughts.
But it was worth making an effort for Mirjana. He was sure she had expected that of him, Rico told me one day. She had expected him not to abandon all these things that were in his head to the street, to the misery of the street. That was why Rico talked to me every day. Out of loyalty to Mirjana.
Rico had filled their glasses. Then he had begun, slowly. As simply as possible.
“You know, Mirjana, I don’t believe in chance. These last few months, I’ve had the same dream a hundred times, that I met you . . . I mean, that I met a woman . . .”
“Did she look like me?”
“No . . . no . . . How can I put it? This woman . . .” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “She wasn’t a fantasy. If you see what I mean. She wasn’t . . .”
“For jerking off to.”
He’d smiled. “That’s right . . . This woman didn’t have a face. Or a body. Just . . . a voice. A soft, warm voice. And yet I could see her. Can you understand that? It was as if I could see her. And she was smiling. I imagined her smiling . . . And . . .”
He had broken off abruptly. He had just realized what the dream meant. The woman was a ghost. The ghost of his nights. And this ghost would take him by the hand. To guide him. To lead him. To the other side. Into another night. The voice would say, “Why aren’t you smiling? Why won’t you give me a smile?” And other words he didn’t understand.
That was when he would wake up, always, bathed in sweat, shaking all over. He would drink, then go back to sleep. He would hear the voice again, just as caressing as before. The woman would again reach out her hand to him. Knocked senseless by alcohol, his mind would become dark and heavy. As heavy as concrete. And just as cold. One night, full of cheap vodka, he had become aware of how damp the darkness was. It had that characteristic smell of freshly turned earth, crawling with worms.
Mirjana hadn’t taken her eyes off him. Nervously, he had downed his drink in one gulp.
“That’s all. That’s . . . all I remember.”
His unease had seemed at that point to grow less intense, more remote. He had looked up at Mirjana. There was an incredulous expression in her eyes.
“That’s all I remember, Mirjana.”
She had lightly brushed Rico’s hand with her fingers, sending a quiver first through his arm, then through his whole body, shaking him to the core.
“You have beautiful hands. I noticed them as soon as I saw you.”
This remark had thrown Rico. His hands were big, broad, with prominent veins. Callous and grazed too. A down-and-out’s hands.
“What’s the point in telling each other these stories? I told you, Rico, it’s as if I was dead. I don’t know where you died. Or when. But you’re like me, I know. We carry our old skins around with us, but inside we’re empty.”
Images flashed through Rico’s head. Sophie slamming the door. The accident on the highway. Julie’s tears. The apartment after Malika had gone. His second night on the street. His body rolling in the gutter. Julien’s expressionless eyes . . . Then, in slow motion, a final image. Titi on a stretcher. Titi being taken away. The end of everything. Titi!
“Yes,” he had admitted, wearily. “That’s true . . . But we’re neither of us at the end of the road yet. We each have one last thing to do. Yours is to go back and kill that guy. Dragan . . .”
“I don’t know, Rico. Sure, I think about it a lot. When the pain is too much for me, I want to kill him. I keep saying to myself, ‘I’m going to kill him.’ To put an end to the pain. To rid myself of the hate . . . But what difference would it make, really? People would still hate each other. Today the Bosnians hate the Serbs. Tomorrow the Serbs will hate the Albanians. There’ll always be people like Dragan . . . And Selim . . . I’m never going back.”
Mirjana’s eyes had shrunk to two luminous dots. Two golden irises. “This is the end of my road, Rico. Here with you.”
Again, she was wrapped in that light that had dazzled him in the morning.
“And you?”
“Me?”
He remembered Léa’s face. And her body. In the light of the setting sun coming in through the window of her small apartment near the harbor. He remembered her thrusting her thighs forward, sitting astride him, her back arched, her breasts offered to him . . .
“I just want to bring a memory back to life. A memory that looks like you, Mirjana.”
He was sitting on the toilet, slowly smoking a cigarette. Two of Mirjana’s panties hung from a nail above the wash basin, drying. Two plain white cotton panties. That made him smile. They seemed quite small to him, those panties, almost a child’s, and he wondered how Mirjana could get her ass into them. He smiled again, at the inappropriateness of the thought.
He threw his cigarette butt down the toilet, then took off his left shoe and counted his remaining money. Four hundred forty-two francs. The money was slipping through his fingers, and he couldn’t figure out how. He counted again, then tried to recall how he had spent so much money since leaving Paris with Dédé. He couldn’t do it. The figures didn’t add up. Finally, he gave up. In any case, the conclusion was obvious. He’d have to think about begging again. The idea turned his stomach. Just as much as when he’d had to resign himself to it the first time.
He thought again about Titi. About his advice, which had helped him. But in the end, the advice didn’t mean anything. He knew that. One Sunday, Rico had seen Titi begging. On Rue d’Aligre, outside the covered market. Limping towards people, his hand held out, pitifully.
“Hey, Jacques, you wouldn’t have a little something for me?”
Rico had seen himself in Titi. It was as if he was looking at himself in a mirror. It had taken him a while to forget the image. An image of how he himself would be, one of these days. It had taken him a while too to summon up the courage to start begging.
When he’d finally resurfaced, Titi had asked him, “Where on earth have you been?”
“Oh, you know. Took a trip down to the Riviera.”
“Oh, yeah. I see. Things not going well, eh?”
“I can’t beg anymore. It disgusts me.”
“I’ll tell you something, Rico. When a man’s at the end of his tether, he begs, but when a woman’s at the end of her tether, she sells her body. Just think of that. Any humiliation you may feel is nothing compared with what they must feel. Getting fucked for a living, we can’t even imagine what that must be like.”
“Mirjana,” he murmured.
He clenched his teeth. With anger. At himself. At mankind. Assholes, all of them . . .
“Assholes!” he cried. “You’re all assholes!”
Furiously, he folded three hundred-franc bills and put them in his shoe, then went out to get beer and cigarettes. He didn’t see how he could wait for Mirjana to come back without anything to drink.
Rico spent the rest of the afternoon like that: drinking, smoking, dozing on the mattress, in the gloom of the shop. Increasingly disgusted with other people as he was, he felt calmer. Even his memories had stopped hurting. It was as if things were finally falling into some kind of order in his head. And this order gave a meaning to everything.
Late in the afternoon, or early in the evening—he had no idea what time it was—he fell asleep thinking about Mirjana’s little panties, while a line from Saint-John Perse hovered in his head:
I had, I had this taste for living among men, and now the earth exhales its foreign soul.
When Mirjana came back, she found h
im sitting on the mattress with a blanket over his shoulders, reading. The ashtray was full to bursting, and there were six empty beer cans next to it.
In one hand, she was holding a flat, square box. In the other, a bottle of red wine.
“Pizza!” she said, putting the box and the bottle on the floor. “And Côtes du Rhône!”
He stood up. “What time is it?”
“Ten o’clock.”
She took off her beret, threw it down angrily on the mattress, and lit a cigarette. She was on edge.
“I’ve had it up to here. The idiots are all watching TV. I didn’t even know there was a match. Marseilles-Lens, I think it is. Can you imagine, one guy wanted me to give him a blowjob in his car so he could still follow his fucking game!”
Rico looked at her. No, Titi, he said to himself, we’ll never know anything like the humiliation women go through.
“The assholes!” she cried.
She went off to the toilet. When she came back, she was wearing her tracksuit. She had removed her make up, brushed her hair back and gathered it in a pony tail. She switched on the heater.
“Let’s eat. I’m hungry.”
They had finished the bottle.
“I should have bought two,” Mirjana said apologetically. She was rolling a joint.
“I have some rum,” Rico said.
He stood up to get his rucksack. He removed the sleeping bag and pulled out a half-pint bottle. A brand called La Martiniquaise. You’d do better to flambé bananas with it than drink it, but at least it was cheap.
“Do you keep everything in your rucksack? Don’t you leave anything lying around so much?”
“It’s what comes of moving around.”
She took a swig of rum, grimaced, then concentrated on her joint. She twisted the end, lit it, and happily inhaled the smoke. She took a second, gentler drag, then put her hand on the back of Rico’s neck, and drew him to her. To her mouth. He let her do it. He closed his eyes. Mirjana’s full lips brushed against his. He opened his mouth at the same time she did. The smoke hit the back of his throat. He breathed it in, then immediately pulled back, making an effort not to cough.
A Sun for the Dying Page 13
