Fox

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  “But wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

  “It would have been good had they all been honest.”

  “They weren’t?”

  “The people working in the field are decent folk. There are even women among them. There’s one woman, for example, everyone knows her, from Bosnia, Davorka from Livno, a single mother supporting six children. She is a de-mining star. But . . .”

  “What?”

  “The boys don’t like it when there are women in the work area . . .”

  “Why?

  “Women bring bad luck. De-miners are like sailors, sailors don’t like women on board ships either.”

  Bojan stood up.

  “It’s late, time for me be off,” he said.

  “And where will you sleep?”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll be back tomorrow for my things, tomorrow is the weekend. Would late morning be OK?”

  “Why don’t you sleep here,” I said, cautiously.

  He didn’t miss the note of caution in my voice. He hesitated but then agreed. The bed in the attic he made up himself.

  We went back out onto the porch and sat a while longer. Outside it was dark now and the sky was studded with stars, the houses were obscured, a velvety silence ruled.

  “I don’t remember when I last saw stars,” I said.

  “The stars are all we have here,” he laughed.

  “Stars and landmines,” I added.

  There I was, apparently, in the very same mousetrap I’d escaped twenty years before. From the mousetrap the moon in the sky always looks like an unattainable wheel of cheese. It now looked like an unassuming little landmine, the kind called a pašteta for its resemblance to a can of meat paste.

  10.

  I was woken in the morning by puttering in the kitchen.

  “Good morning!” he said as I entered the living room.

  I couldn’t remember when somebody had last greeted me with “Good morning.” He had an easy, deep voice, he measured his words slowly . . .

  “Sorry? Come again?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I could’ve sworn I heard an internal comment.”

  “So?”

  “But the day has only just begun.”

  “It hasn’t . . . begun,” I grumbled, out of sorts.

  “Have a seat,” he said calmly.

  Black coffee steamed on the table, and there were bunches of fresh-picked radishes and scallions laid out on a dish, toast in a basket, and onto my plate slid two soft, fried sunny-side-up eggs, perfectly round.

  “Fresh local eggs. The hen laid them this morning. Just for you. The hen’s name is Biserka. She’s become a friend of mine.”

  “I may start to cry,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because in one of my favorite films this American literature professor, a Bertolt Brecht expert, cries every time his girlfriend, a Polish woman, fries up eggs for his breakfast . . .”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the literature professor sees this as the ultimate gesture of tenderness.”

  “I agree. Though I’d choose eggs Benedict as my ultimate gesture. You get them tomorrow morning,” he said, joking.

  “While we’re on the subject . . .”

  “Not yet, tomorrow,” he continued, grinning.

  “But what I mean is . . .”

  And then with no lead-in, question, or invitation, a muddled mishmosh of words tumbled out of me before this man I hardly knew, who had only just woken up and kindly fixed me breakfast, what I was saying was a porridge with no taste or sense, a jumbled summary of my nocturnal meditations. I said I had no idea what I’d do with the house; I hadn’t come here to stay but to check and see how things stood; I hadn’t known the owner; I’d no idea why the man left me the place; the house was so much nicer than I could’ve dreamed, in fact it felt like a “deep metaphor for home” (these were my exact words, though I had no clue what I meant by them); I found this all baffling, perhaps precisely for that reason; I traveled a lot; I didn’t live in Croatia; sure, I visited from time to time; I wasn’t certain whether I was ready to move back; for now I was at a loss; I was unsure about everything; I had no plans; so it was best that we didn’t change anything; we’d both leave things as they were; I’d go back to Zagreb tomorrow or the day after; and I’d like to ask him to stay on as he had until then, especially as he’d become one with the house—more than I’d ever be able to . . .

  I took a breath.

  “Look at the miracle worked by two sunny-side-up eggs,” he said easily.

  We both fell silent. The morning sun shone in through the window. I got up and opened the door to the porch. In the distance, pools of water were gleaming, looking, from afar, like mirrors that somebody was playing with, ready to blind whoever looked at them.

  “What’s that in the distance? Water?”

  “Bogs left after last winter, wetlands.”

  The view of the sheen in the distance, Bojan, the house, all of it together—stirred a vague disquiet. Together, wrapped up in this package, it touched on something I’d locked away a long time before and suddenly I found myself in a state of high alert, exactly as if my security system were under attack.

  I didn’t know where it all began. Perhaps people really did change every cell in their body every seven years, I wasn’t so sure about that, but what I did know was that each big change left fissures behind. A first crack, a second, a third, and at some point the teacup fragmented into little pieces all by itself. Will you look at that, it just broke apart, we’d say. I’d seen that, that effect, on people I knew. It was easy to keep things together while the natural glues, hormones, health still worked, while the skin was smooth and radiant, while the muscles were taut, while we were at our best, while we were loved, while there was a purpose, while we loved others . . . But what happened when all that was gone?

  11.

  It was Sunday and Bojan offered to guide me through his work area. He was right, it wasn’t far at all from the house, barely eight miles. We drove along a dirt road through the woods.

  “To the left is an MSA, and to the right, it’s not . . .”

  “How do you know the area to the right is not?”

  “We have information. There are conventions between armies. Accurate maps of where the landmines are buried are a precious commodity . . .”

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s information worth haggling over with the enemy, it can be used to trade for the lives of prisoners, and so forth . . .”

  “Can it be trusted?”

  “Certain conventions must be respected.”

  “So the left side of the woods is dangerous, and the right is not?”

  “Exactly.”

  We stopped and got out of the car. I can’t remember when I last smelled the intense fragrance of the woods. The forest was glowing with light as if posing for National Geographic. The sun broke through the dense canopy in bundles of golden arrows and lit the rich undergrowth of ferns as if from within like Chinese lanterns. Everywhere there were red ribbons, markers reaching deep into the woods. The woods were like a pagan shrine. Lit by the sun, the red ribbons resembled the veins of some mystical organism pulsing among the forest ferns. Two little machines like children’s toy robots stood by the side of the road. Minesweeping robots . . .

  “You’re right . . . The woods are like a shrine. I don’t know if you noticed that the machines have fitting names, Zeus, Titan . . . And the landmines are, like all weapons, a designer metaphor for male sexual fantasies. Most of them are shaped like penises, when you line them up they look like sex toys at a porno shop. The hand grenades resemble testicles. Indian traditional culture reveres the lingam and they’re scattered all over the place in an array of sizes. These western versions are more restrained, camouflaged, but essentially the same. Men prattle to their member and give it nicknames. You probably know that. They have the same attitude toward weapons.”

 
“Why?”

  “It probably helps them rein in their fear . . .”

  “What are some of the nicknames for the landmines?”

  “Meat Paste, See-saw, Corn Cob, Bell, Whitey, Sardine . . .”

  And the most dangerous?”

  “The Prom, an anti-personnel bounding spray mine. Deadly. Last year a crew member of ours was killed by one.”

  “And other kinds?”

  “Sometimes we come across landmines left over from the Second World War. When our crew was clearing the area around Lastovo they stumbled, literally, on a British landmine. It killed one of our de-miners after it had lain there for sixty years, dormant.”

  For some reason everything felt strangely quiet, as if we were wrapped in cotton batting.

  “I, too, have that feeling. Are we unwittingly bracing for a blast? You know what the Egyptians call a mine field?” said Bojan.

  “What?”

  “The devil’s garden.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Because de-miners, like sailors, dislike noise. It’s forbidden to whistle while on board a ship, did you know that?”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Whistling attracts a storm.”

  Just then we heard whistling.

  “The Valloner.”

  “Who is the Valloner?”

  “A what, not a who. A metal detector. Vallon manufactures them.”

  We listened to the trill of the mournful “Valloner.”

  “Can you see him? The man in the flak jacket with the metal detector? There, to the left, just beyond the bushes.”

  Not far from us I saw a man in a light-green flak jacket, sweeping the forest floor.

  “Has he found a mine?”

  “The detector finds metal, it could be anything,” said Bojan.

  “Come to Daddy-o, my sweet little girlie-o, my little minie-mine, little girlie girl, come to me, baby minelet, driving me round the bendo, mean old thing-o, I know you’re in there, come out, come out, little miss Tinker Bell, let daddy have a look-see . . .” purred the man.

  “That’s Terminator. He’s always chatting with the mines.”

  “Why’s he working today? Isn’t it Sunday?”

  “He’s never quite been the same since a mine blew off his right hand. He’s retired but he still comes to work. We can’t get rid of him. He is always on the job. He’s obsessed with landmines, treats them as if they’re alive. People, he says, are worse than mines, mines take your leg or arm, people take your soul . . .”

  The man caught sight of us and waved.

  “Hey, Judge, what’s up?” he called.

  “I stopped by to see what you’re up to!”

  The man waved again and then back to work he went . . .

  “See that, Tinker Bell, girlie-o? They’re seeing what we’re up to, as if the two of us aren’t fine and dandy all on our lonesome, we two are so much happier when we’re by ourselves, aren’t we, mine-o, girlie-o . . .”

  12.

  “So why did the Terminator man call you Judge?” I asked as we drove back to the house.

  “That’s my nickname. We all have them. Like the mines.”

  “But why ‘Judge’?”

  “Because I was one.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, for a time I was a judge.”

  “But not anymore?”

  “It wasn’t a good fit.”

  “Why?”

  In ’91, as a judge sitting on the Zagreb municipal civil court, he’d watched as the new authorities fired his colleagues, Serbs, only because their documents stated somewhere that they were Serbs or Yugoslavs. Sure, there was a war on. War is war, such things are to be expected. He, however, at that awkward moment found himself ashamed of both Croats and Serbs. He was a blockhead, he chose the stupidest form of protest. It couldn’t be called the least efficient, because every protest was equally lame: once war shifts into high gear it’s hard to stop. He was waiting in line at the Zagreb police station on Petrinjska Street for a new ID card, and when the woman at the counter asked him what his ethnicity was, he declared loud and clear that he was a Serb.

  “But your documents state you’re a Croat!” said the lady clerk.

  “Wrong! I’m a Serb.”

  “Instead of being ashamed, I see you’re actually boasting about it,” said the lady clerk.

  “Serb, write Serb!” he dug in his heels.

  “Chetnik!” snarled the clerk, but she didn’t enter that into the computer.

  At a moment when all “normal” people were trying to bury any ties they might have to Serbs, when they were clamming up about any Serbian relatives, divorcing, changing their names—his protest, no matter how paltry, reverberated across the overflowing waiting room and reached the ears of his supervisors.

  “You were brave.”

  “No, I was a jackass,” he said hollowly.

  From his seat on the bench he slid downward, though, true, to a soft perch, and joined a private law firm as an attorney. They were all “his boys,” mostly Serbs, they’d ended up out on the street as had he, but unlike him they’d hopped to it and opened private law offices. One of them, a friend, asked him to join them, and it went well at first, but then, suddenly, the friend became a dynamo. The legal profession was suddenly the most prestigious Croatian occupation. The international criminal court in The Hague, the ICTY, had begun its work and trials of war-crimes and war-criminals were starting up, while at home, at the local level, the full depth and breadth of Croatian corruption was suddenly surfacing. His buddies threw themselves into defending the worst of the lot and showed themselves to be highly adept. At first they made excuses, the law is the law, a crime is a crime, a doctor is there to save lives, not to treat only the patients he likes, blah, blah, blah . . . And everything went along as smooth as silk, the boys got rich, and the local “godfathers” and “commandos” were received like national heroes when they were released. Something wasn’t quite right. His boys became hotshots, no different than ordinary swindlers, their pictures showed up in newspapers with them in their Hugo Boss suits, looking like shysters, raking in colossal compensation for their brief spate of humiliation in ’91. Now they were swamped with work and, look, riffraff, as a result, was going free. Nobody was proffering a helping hand to the innocent. After all, innocent people had no way to pay the lawyers. His boys, all Serbs, had become more avid Croats than the Croats themselves, and meanwhile, what do you know, he, Bojan, was labeled forever—a Chetnik! This is where he snapped . . .

  “Anybody normal would have snapped,” I said.

  “It’s not that simple. My snapping didn’t make me a hero, nor did I snap because I’m heroic.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The sun beat down on the car windows. Bojan’s profile was limned in sharp relief. He worked his mouth, trying to nip at a flap of dry skin on his lips. Individuals were not at fault, at fault was a situation that drew out the hidden potential in most people, and he stressed potential with irony. From that, from that feeling of intoxication, many had gone off the rails . . . The war destroyed plenty of human lives, one way or another. All that should be forgotten. Normal people do what they can to forget.

  “Are you one of them?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he laughed.

  “Yet you work in de-mining?”

  “And why is that such a contradiction?”

  13.

  My little niece came home from school all in tears because she didn’t know the answer to the question of why the Battle of Gory was waged.

  “How do I know why they fought that stupid Gory Battle?” wailed the little girl.

  “You mean the Battle of Gorjani? 1537? It was over real estate,” I explained.

  “What’s real estate?”

  “You know, like summer cottages, apartments.”

  “Auntie!” she huffed with exasperation so I’d know she knew I was only being silly.

  Every war is foug
ht over real estate. This last war, too, was waged—or so it seemed when all was said and done—for real estate. Somebody lost property, somebody else procured it, some moved in, others moved out, some smashed others’ statues, some torched others’ homes, some, uprooting others, grabbed control of factories, banks, media, political positions, mines, shipyards, ambassadorial posts, railway lines, highways . . . Blood was shed for real estate. The warmongers used the word “homeland” for real estate so people would have fewer misgivings. Why say he fell for real estate when it sounds so much more convincing to say he fell for the homeland? For buying and selling real estate one gets a percentage, for defending the homeland—medals. Cunning participants in the last war got the percentage and the medals and more: the real estate as well.

  I visited V. in Zagreb before I came to Kuruzovac. He’d known my father, though they were never close. They were from the same village and both had run off into the partisans as boys, before they were seventeen. A few months ago V. wrote me the only letter he’d ever sent me. He expressed his fear, in the letter, that he wasn’t long for this world and would like to see me. A sense of obligation and curiosity persuaded me to call him and set a date for a visit.

  The old man received me, obviously overjoyed. His son, a few years younger than I, was also there. The absence of a woman’s touch was glaringly evident: the old man’s wife, crippled by Alzheimer’s, was spending her last days at an elder-care facility. The son set the table; I declared my satisfaction with the nibbles they’d offered, which pleased the old man no end. V. was obviously eager to talk; his son, however, inadvertently filled the pauses with chatter in an effort to relieve the pressure on his father, who had slowed with age. V. groped for words too often and after several vain stabs at joining the conversation, gave up. At one moment, he did snare my attention with gestures and pulled me off to his room. He had an old elementary-school desk and on it an old-fashioned typewriter. The desk was too small and too uncomfortable for the old man. He showed me a shelf with books where I spotted two of my own. The real reason he’d wanted to see me, however, lay on a shelf: a heap of his manuscripts, neatly typed on the typewriter and bound in light-blue, cloth covers. I saw right away what I was supposed to do: I picked a volume and promised to read and return it. The old man’s face shone with real joy.