“This is not the time to talk about it. Why should you remind me of it now? And in public. That’s an insult.”
“I didn’t mean it as an insult. But it’s twelve years since I gave you two hundred German marks—I was a kid then and gave you all my savings so you could get your wife from Bulgaria to Yugoslavia, and it’s high time you returned it.”
“Why are you speaking of such private matters here in public? That definitely is an insult. Let’s go out and fight,” Stephan said. The park was enshrouded in a musty mist after the rain.
There was a liter mug of foamy beer in front of Stephan, and two others with foam at the bottom. His eyes were bloodshot. A pink knife scar ran diagonally over his brown forehead. He was standing up slowly, stroking the side of his black jacket as if to ascertain his knife was where it should be.
Boris had no knife and he didn’t want to find out whether Stephan had one. Boris was in better physical shape; he worked in West Germany as a Gastarbeiter in the Bayerische Motoren Werke near Munich. A fight would attract the police, who, knowing Boris worked in the West, would detain him out of malice longer than his vacation and he’d lose his job. If he won the fight, he’d still lose.
Stephan was already standing, and shouting, “Why are you waiting? Let’s go into the woods where nobody can see us.” Dozens of people were smoking silently, watching them. Boris was glad that the people listened to them, because that was some sort of protection, and yet he was not glad, because the situation was embarrassing.
“I have no reason to fight,” said Boris.
“I have a reason to: you insulted me.”
“I didn’t intend to insult you; without intention, there is no insult.”
“There is. The fact that you showed so little respect, that you think I am a Gypsy bum, that came across, and that is an insult. Now we have no way out.”
“You being a Gypsy makes no difference. Gypsies are people just like everybody else.”
“See, I told you, you are a chauvinist. We’ll have to fight it out.”
“You talk nonsense.”
“Come on, let’s fight; do me the favor; I want to kill you.”
“Calm down. I didn’t intend to insult you, and I don’t care about the money that much. It wouldn’t make sense to fight for so little money—life is not so cheap.”
“You’d be surprised how cheap life can get. And you are insulting me again by publicly mentioning that I owe you money. I don’t owe you nothing. I don’t owe nobody in the world nothing. The whole world can fuck itself, and you to begin with. But it’s nice of you that you say we don’t owe nothing to each other. Very nice. We could be friends again.”
“I have no desire to be friends with you.”
“Oh, come on, couldn’t we be friends?” He bulged his large eyeballs, the color of tobacco, jaundiced, with burst capillaries. “Waiter, bring us two mugs!”
Two mugs of beer promptly whirled down on the table, some foam spilling and soaking into the white cloth, hissing or whispering, “Shhh,” as if asking for silence.
Stephan clanked his mug against Boris’s, which stayed untouched on the table. The tension was suspended, on hold, and Boris looked into the bubbles swerving to the surface and joining the foam. The lower layer of foam was all made of little bubble balls, resembling a spawning ground of small fish. He wondered how it was possible to be in his shoes now, a little bubble who strove to rise high as a kid by being a good Christian, by giving all his money to the poor man he vaguely knew, and instead of rising to the top, he was stranded somewhere meaningless, petty, not even receiving gratitude for that one redeeming moment of goodness. He received outrage instead! He remembered how Stephan had played a cracked guitar on a park bench not far from where they were sitting now, playing Mexican songs with tears in his eyes, in his throat. Boris, touched, had run home, bringing back all his red and blue banknotes.
Boris daydreamed now, recalling Stephan’s little brother, who had been a few grades below Boris, but couldn’t remember his name. The pupils had always left their shoes lined up against the wall in the corridor—they used cloth slippers in the classroom—and shoes now and then disappeared. Since the brother used to leave class before the end of the lessons, he had often been accused of stealing the shoes. Once, he stood in front of the whole class, barefoot, weeping, his hair disheveled, his shirt not tucked in, the smallest boy in the class, and the teacher slapped his cheeks and whipped his opened palms with a willow branch, shouting, “Admit it, dirty Gypsy, you’ve stolen the shoes!” The boy swore he didn’t and got whipped more. The teacher searched his bag. The shoes were not there. She made the whole class search everywhere in the yard for the hidden shoes that Stephan’s brother had stolen.
After the beating, the brother missed school for two weeks, and when he came back on a snowy day, he was barefoot. He couldn’t have stolen the shoes: he would have worn them. Wasn’t he beaten because he was a Gypsy? Boris recalled how he too beat the boy once to find out whether it was true what he had been told, that Gypsies were nimble fighters. He had dragged the boy, half his size, all around the greasy floor of the classroom, and choked him under the teacher’s desk. When the teacher came, she made only the brother—and not Boris—kneel in the corner over corn kernels. The brother dropped out of school after that year, the fifth grade.
“Cheers!” Stephan knocked his glass against Boris’s, now in Boris’s hands, and they drank, not looking each other in the eye. “So, ready to fight now?”
“You change like the weather.”
“You know, you left for Germany and you never even sent me a card. Never mind; I forgive you. Really, in this town I have no friends. Let’s be friends again.”
“It would take a lot of restoration of trust…”
“Come on, I was only joking about fighting. Trust is a good thing. Banks are called trusts in many countries, the world cannot live without trust. I hope you trust me, do you trust me?” Stephan again stroked the sides of his jacket.
“Sure, I can trust you.”
“Can. Do you? Many things can be, but what’s the fact?”
“All right, I trust you,” Boris said, disgusted with the mind games and with his lack of courage, his paranoia about the police, wondering whether he shouldn’t simply fight, be a man. He was shocked he was now being threatened, and it seemed to him that he perversely liked it, though equally perversely he would have liked to cut Stephan’s throat so that his greenish face would become purple.
“If you trust me,” said Stephan, “prove it. I hear you want to buy some Hungarian currency…”
“How do you know that?” Boris asked in astonishment. It was true: Boris was getting ready to spend the rest of his vacation in Hungary.
“How do I know that? Ha! I know more about you than you think, some things that not even you know!” To punctuate his statement, he raised his eyebrows and contemptuously snorted. “So, my dear friend, why don’t you exchange two hundred German marks for my forints. I have them; we Gypsies have special connections with Hungary.”
“Well, what’s your exchange rate?”
“One mark is twenty forints in the bank. I’ll give you a beautiful exchange rate—forty forints. You cannot find any better than that.” His throaty voice was persuasive.
Boris found it comfortable to think about the exchange rates rather than about their bizarre conflict, and as he thought about the money, suddenly he began to think it would be good to get a lot of forints. He could live like a lord in Hungary for a week. “Yes, the rate is good, but I don’t have the money here.”
“Where do you have it? At home? I’ll walk you home.”
“All right,” Boris said, though he was not sure he wanted the exchange. “You have the money here?”
“Greedy, aren’t you? Yes, I have it.”
Boris was about to ask him to show it, but Stephan winked at him, smiled, and said: “Trust, remember? If you test, you don’t trust.”
As they walked to Boris�
��s, Stephan said, “You know, it’s probably just as well we didn’t fight. We can be good friends.”
Boris said nothing to that.
“But if we fought—of course we’d damage each other, knock out a tooth or two, break noses, see my nose? Pretty crooked, isn’t it? I broke noses more times than mine was broken.”
“I don’t want to break your nose or teeth, nor mine. It’s expensive to get a new tooth,” Boris said.
“How expensive is it in Germany?”
“One thousand marks.”
“Wow, you do live in the promised land, don’t you? That much just for a rotten tooth! You should be thankful I haven’t knocked out your teeth. Still, it’s a pity we didn’t fight. Maybe someday we’ll correct that. You know, after a fight, we could get drunk and really make friends. If you’ve nearly killed each other, then you know where you stand, and next time you just laugh about your troubles. You are closer than brothers. These friendships last for life, you know.” He spoke in a lamenting voice, tears in his eyes, as if they had missed something wonderful.
“I am not sure about that,” Boris said.
“And how come we are walking? Don’t the Germans give you a BMW to drive around?”
“Well, yes, but I flew in, it’s less bother.”
“Oh, you flew in, it’s less bother,” Stephan mimicked with mock sympathy.
Boris was thinking of saying that he didn’t want to exchange any money. But Stephan looked crazy, beery foam was in the corners of his mouth and tears rolling down his cheeks. “My friend, you’d have no way of running away; my brothers would find you or I would find you anywhere in the world. We like to travel.”
Boris looked at him askance. What the hell was the root of that emotion in Stephan’s voice and eyes? It had nothing to do with his words.
Boris felt like a fool as he handed out two hundred marks into one of Stephan’s hands. Stephan’s other hand stayed in the pocket. At first Boris thought nothing of it, expecting Stephan would hand him the Hungarian money nearly simultaneously. But, as the money parted from his fingers, Boris felt a bit of a void in his stomach. Stephan began to laugh and said, “So there we go again. In all these years, you’ve learned nothing!”
“Where are the forints?”
“What forints? Well, in Hungary there are a lot! Oh, yes, I’d quite forgotten. Tonight I’ll be at the Park Café to give you the money. Everything. But if I am not there, then I fooled you, you hear? I owe you nothing. I outsmarted you; that’s fair. It’s time you learned some basics. Private education is expensive.”
“True, I was dumb about this whole thing, but you didn’t outsmart me. You said things were based on trust.”
“That’s where you were outsmarted. You did not trust me. If you had, it would have been a balanced exchange. See, I trusted you all the way, that’s why I came ahead. Well, my friend, I had a great time with you, it’s time to shake hands.”
Stephan pursed his lips and closed his eyes as if to kiss Boris. Boris shrank back.
In the evening Boris was having a wiener schnitzel at the Park Café, drinking red wine, curious as to whether Stephan would show up to return some of the money or to try to get more. Boris felt humiliated the whole evening as he drank with his friend Davor, who talked about the need to introduce the free market economy and multi-party system as a means of checks and balances. Boris didn’t listen, and he couldn’t confide what had gone on because he feared he would sound like a chauvinist, filled with prejudice, postjudice—generalization from too few facts, which was worse than prejudice. He thought he could say, “I know there are bad people among all the races, why should the Gypsies be any different?” Not even that would do.
I should not call anybody a Gypsy. The new name is Roma. But I am not used to the new name. What difference does a name make? Nothing makes a difference here. It’s an all-around dehumanizing experience. Or a humanizing one. All real experience is a humanizing one.
A cool breeze flowed out of the woods, and Boris could see the clear sky, even the haze of the Milky Way was somehow clear. Boris chewed the steak and said, “This is like licking and chewing boots.”
“That’s right, Boro,” said Davor, trying to fit a lens, smeared with his arching fingerprints, back into his glasses frame. “You don’t feel it, but here we live like dogs. We are the Third World right here in Central Europe. Why, we are Bolivia—we’ve moved to South America with our inflation. All we have is our rain forest!” Davor laughed. “And why? The Serbs have squeezed out of Croatia all the foreign currency we make by tourism and exports. As long as the Serbs rule Croatia…the national problem…”
Boris stared. What was this? Chauvinism? A just complaint? Why all this obsession with Serbs?
The next morning, hung over, Boris sat in front of the milk bar at the center of the town, blinking, observing the passersby, carrying on the conversation with Davor and pondering the night before.
How could Stephan turn out to be such a crook? He is probably faithful and law-abiding within his community, but owes no obligation to the white, Slavic community that suspects him, scorns him, excludes him. I was somehow condescending, as I had been doing him the favor all the way along, talking to him. But there was some beauty in it all. I was being humiliated, but I said to myself, let him exploit me, let me be humiliated like a whimsical character from a Russian novel, that is, a novel by Dostoevsky and not Tolstoy—don’t people always mean a novel by Dostoevsky when they say “a Russian novel”?
Boris felt there was something dishonest in his explanation of the incident; he wanted to give it a certain polish.
Davor in the meanwhile talked on. “And nobody can find jobs here anymore. Serbian managers sell machinery and entire factories to foreigners, who dismantle them. We find part-time jobs, or none, or we smuggle from abroad. The concept of honesty has changed…”
Just then from around the corner appeared Stephan with a barefoot, messy-haired boy of about ten, his son. The two walked into a shoe store, and reappeared a couple of minutes later, the boy hopping in a pair of Pumas and the father looking on with glistening eyes and smiling broadly.
Boris smiled too, unburdened.
YAHBO THE HAWK
INSTEAD OF TO THE CHURCH, I walked one Sunday morning to the nearby park. Just as I was about to climb an oak, I saw my friend Peter walking down the path beside a grim partisan monument.
Peter used to lead Catholic funeral processions, holding a varnished cross, dressed in white vestments, his checks pink in the wind or the heat, while a priest sang in monotonous Latin. I respected Peter for his knowledge of Latin, which still did not prevent me from cornering him in our classroom and punching him like a boxing sack. I rented him for that purpose, a dinar for ten minutes of practice. Peter now carried a covered pleated basket.
“What have you got there?” I asked him.
“If you want to find out, give me five dinars.”
I gave him a bronze dinar coin and peeped in.
“Don’t open much; they might fly away!”
“What are they? Little ravens?”
“No. Can’t you see? Hawks.”
“And what will you do with them?”
“I don’t know. Feed my dog.”
“Look, why don’t you give them to me?”
“Give. Are you crazy? They’re not easy to come by!”
“Well, what do you want for a hawk?”
“It’s a precious bird. You could train it to catch chickens, one a day, which would make three hundred and sixty-five chickens a year, and with that you could buy all kinds of things…”
“I’ll give you my sword.”
“Come on! We outgrew that.”
“My sweater and my jeans?”
“They would be too tight on me.”
“You could stretch them.”
“No, forget it!”
And he pretended he would walk on.
“How about a strawberry ice cream?”
Now I had him. His
mouth began to water. He swallowed saliva, his eyelids drooped. “Three!”
We walked to the sweets shop. I bought him three ice creams and he lapped them like a cat drinking milk. Then he took out one hawk. I gripped it to make sure its talons, small Turkish sabers turned upside down, could not reach me. I was uneasy about the beak.
“I’d like the other hawk too!”
“That would be ten almond ice creams.”
“How about three egg-cream cakes?”
“Four!” he said.
I searched through my pockets, and in the mess of nails, wires, cigarette butts, and several round pebbles for throwing at traffic signs and teacher’s windows, I found one torn red piece of paper with a picture of a muscular factory worker on it.
“Let that be a deposit!”
I rushed home with the hawk in my hands, held far in front of me.
The hot bird pulsated with fast heartbeats; its whole body was one big heart with sharp edges and eyes atop its valves. As soon as I got home, I put it into a cupboard, stole some money that was kept in a prayer book to ensure divine protection, and ran back to the sweets shop.
Peter was not there. I learned later that he sold the bird to a cop’s son, Nik. Next time I ran into Peter, I said, “Look, I paid for the hawk, and you gave it away. Get the hawk back from Nik!”
“No, I want to be on good terms with him and his father because I still need to steal some things…”
“All right, this is for the deposit!” I gave him a black eye, to which he responded by giving me a wonderful show of the firmament, with more stars than there are sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—a black eye of my own. In all fairness to the art of painting, which takes time, I must say that his eye was not yet black but red and purple, the following day it was green and yellow, and on the third day it was blue. Now I knew that you could get green out of blue and yellow, but that you could get blue out of green and yellow was a novelty, and it was not an exception proving the rule, because the area surrounding my eyes followed the same revolutions of color as his. In the end our colors were dark blue, like the most common sort of plums. Ashamed of my plum-eye, for four days I joined the pirates, wearing a greasy strap of leather across my head.
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