They seemed to be talking about politics.
They were in that limbo of television programs—it was now fifteen years since the war and nothing new had yet begun.
Nikola was on his third beer, when it occurred to him that six beers wouldn’t be enough.
Luckily, the gas station was open.
• • •
Uncle Martin was calling. Unbelievable.
“What’s up?”
“My plane lands today,” Oleg said into the phone. “You’re at the cottage?” There, by the river, he meant. And Oleg could picture him there.
“Yup. Where’s Nikola?”
“He’s staying over the border for a while.”
“What are you good-for-nothings up to over there?” Oleg could picture him saying that.
“We’re renovating a factory.”
“You?”
“With the workers.”
“Really?”
“And . . . And . . . I’ve scheduled a tennis game with Ajderovitsch on Mrok.”
“Can you stomach that?”
“I make sacrifices. We’re saving an entire town here. We’ve given all the rights to the workers.”
“Wow! Is your personality actually changing?”
“Take care, Uncle.” Oleg meant to hang up.
“Any chance you’ll drop by one of these days?”
He hadn’t heard this invitation in a very long time. There, by the river.
“Sure.”
“Come on then. All that matters is that you’re not embroiled with that shady bunch. Remember what I said. I’ll be calling you from beyond the grave if you build your fortune on blood.”
“You never said that!”
“I’m saying it now.”
“I didn’t, Uncle. I did what I could to survive.”
“Drop by.”
Wake-up. Cell phone alarm.
Yes, he had a plane to catch. Oh, he’d drunk too much with that Gigo guy.
Was that Uncle Martin on the phone?
Yes, but he’s dead.
Right, forget it.
6
NIKOLA SAT IN the director’s office, wondering if he ought to be making the rounds of the plant again and whether he looked ridiculous as he nodded sagely.
Then he received Oleg’s text: “How’s it going? I’m in a cab on my way to Mrok. Keep your fingers crossed that I lose.”
Mrok.
Maybe it was because he’d taken his dose of tranquilizers just then, or because he was so far away, but the word stirred images in Nikola’s mind that were fragile, almost unreal.
Him and his father. Then: him, his father, and Oleg. Then: just him and Oleg. Then: just Oleg.
Their history in photographs sporting their tennis whites.
He started going there with his old man when he was still a boy, when his dad won an award in Venice and they moved to the verdant part of the city where there weren’t so many kids out on the streets, so the tennis club became like a neighborhood playground for him. Back then he didn’t know that the people he used to romp around with were the crème de la crème: the directors of companies, bank managers, doctors, lawyers—some of them even dissidents, he later realized. There were a couple of filmmakers like his old man, a few painters, sculptors, actors, television personalities. Only later did he learn who was who. Even today at the occasional reputable watering hole, he’d spot someone he could nod to and, if necessary, remind them—“Son of Martin the filmmaker, you know me from Mrok.”
This would always earn him a pat on the back and a sincere smile—the kind reserved for the picture of a child from the past. Apparently, I was a sweet kid, thought Nikola, and I loved throwing them balls as if that were what I was on earth to do.
Yes, he later discovered he had always preferred doing things that weren’t his job to things that were. Perhaps this was why a lot of the respectable people, after the sincere pat, had that brief moment of confusion when they wouldn’t know what else to say. Maybe they remembered that his business flopped, that he’d sold his father’s apartment and moved from the verdant part of town. He thought they’d heard, although maybe they hadn’t: maybe they just didn’t know what to say to someone who had once been a sweet kid. Or maybe, when they really thought about it, they didn’t much care about memories dating back to before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He thought about that time, when the world was changing like at a magician’s show: a man would be sliced up with sabers but come out alive while the audience applauded. That’s how, he thought, history is refracted at Mrok in an almost enchanted way. Because, of course, as far as the club was concerned, there was no reason to throw out old members or refuse to accept new ones. And, ultimately, there were new members and a fair number of the old ones, after all the sport in question was gallant, tolerant, gentlemanly; it was not blue or red or black, but white. What mattered were the backhands, forehands, and fairness in judging whether the ball had landed outside the lines; and though they’d come from various backgrounds, Nikola knew that people acquired a certain club identity with time, though ancillary, of course, so ancillary that he never mentioned it on his résumé—but still, if you were a member of Mrok, you were a part of the game; if you were a Mroker, you were there, in the changing room, in the heady atmosphere of the club café, always as a hand, either left or right, which mattered less as long as it held a racket.
For Nikola, there was nothing more logical than this quiet, seemingly smooth regime change. To his generation, which had grown up in jeans, this was like reaching the port they’d long been sailing toward. And he continued going to Mrok, of course, just like the other Mrokers of his generation, maybe because, thanks to American movies, they’d always wanted to live in a capitalist society and become capitalists, and it occurred to Nikola that this might possibly have been the mind-set of most of the population living in ex-socialist countries. He thought of how strange it was to think back on this, but most of the people, in his opinion, had been set on becoming capitalists, maybe not consciously, but still . . . nobody was set on becoming an unemployed jerk.
Since this was more or less what happened to him—because without Oleg right now that’s exactly what he’d be: an unemployed jerk—his idiocy was, he concluded, even greater than usual, considering that he somehow, almost imperceptibly over time, frittered away all the social capital he’d accrued at Mrok. And Mrok was one of the rare places where the people who’d set their sights on becoming capitalists hadn’t been just shooting the breeze—their chances had actually been, let’s say, fair. Mrok was frequented by the new powermongers and the old directors and the bankers, all of whom claimed they’d always been technocrats, economics honchos, and the old system had only stymied their ambitions for the market. They all agreed to the necessity of privatizing socialist companies, and after their tennis games they’d often get caught up in very complex discussions about how to take out a mortgage on a property you were purchasing, with frequent mentions of the word “preagreement.”
“Preagreement, mortgage, loan, purchase. It’s like when you’re buying an apartment and you take out a mortgage—you do the same with a company, but somebody has to give you the big loan,” explained his friend Hlap.
Later, Nikola did just that.
“If you default on the loan, the bank forecloses on your company just as it would foreclose on your apartment. And presto, bankruptcy. A company, you see, is like property. It’s based on property.”
“Oh? Meaning—”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“So it is?”
“Well, every normal socialist company holds property. Companies aren’t made of software, are they?”
Nikola also believed in the free market, and it wasn’t clear to him at all why, in the end—after having been a viable candidate in the right place at the right time�
�he hadn’t been ushered into the national elite.
He wondered whether his incompetence or a flaw in his character held him back from playing the game as he should have, because he somehow felt that what Hlap said was all wrong, and as a result he spent a long time “searching for himself,” thinking that maybe he could make it as a filmmaker, only to finally open a little TV production company following the classic road map: he took out a loan by mortgaging the apartment he’d inherited. When running his company, he turned his nose up at the obligatory sucking up, networking, and deals, which he treated with aristocratic contempt, losing track of the fact that he had no aristocratic castle to fall back on. He thought he’d shine solely on quality—he really thought their productions were good—but the market in his line of work turned out to be an illusion, and the story of quality that would shine on its own became yet another story about justice. A big market functioned differently, he believed, but in this small market made up of public broadcasting and a handful of commercial channels, with only a few players shuffling the cards, Nikola began, as they’d say, talking shit about deals, especially when drunk—sometimes so audaciously that, for a while, the ones he’d blustered at thought he had serious backing, after all he was a Mroker. But with time they must have seen he was not a serious player; he was an idiot who got on people’s nerves and spoiled the game, something he was not aware of. He discovered this at an inopportune moment, just when he had, out loud, near the end of a Christmas party, offered a share in his company, in passing, as if this were something not to be missed, to the television executive who pulled all the strings in programming, ah yes, that was, indeed, foolhardy, but by then Nikola was already reeling from debt and drink. It was foolish, no doubt, though everybody hated the guy, or so Nikola thought, because the man’s backroom dealing was so glaringly obvious, still, he woke up the following morning with a hangover brought on by worry, hoping those last moments of the party wouldn’t be counted toward his final score; he tried putting it behind him, but then noticed he’d gotten too few Happy New Year text messages, only to realize later that people weren’t answering his calls, hardly anybody called him—except for the wonderful people who weren’t in the know. His productions weren’t being accepted anywhere, he must have been the only fool who had truly believed in the market, and since he was a pain in the neck, everybody had, spontaneously and collectively, dumped him.
The question was, he now thought, whether he had ever frankly admitted this to himself. At the time, he had been more focused on his mental state, his sessions with his therapist, his search through his childhood, the talk about his relationships, alcohol, and anxiety attacks.
He moved away and he hadn’t been back to Mrok in a long time. I’m probably ashamed of my failure, he thought. Besides, he saw the new car models in front of the club differently now, and he wasn’t too eager to meet the people from his old crowd who were still in the game, because, even though they greeted each other as if they were friends, he had the impression they were now mere acquaintances.
Since then he’d heard on the Internet that the television executive he’d offended was marched off to prison with a paparazzi escort, though this meant little to Nikola, and nor did the long-overdue texts of support—from the neutral seen the latest? to the malicious-yet-supportive what goes around comes around to the optimistic coffee?—from people who presumably thought he was still active somewhere, lurking on the margins of the business world, poised to jump into the fray, or, they wondered, had Nikola himself been the one to put the crook behind bars? None of them had any idea that Nikola was, in fact, in the town of N., in the middle of Nowheresville, Yeti-land, watching this all from a mind-cooling distance, finally coming to grips with why he was here.
Where I am now, thought Nikola, is the final picture: like when a cuckolded partner finally sees the incriminating photographs, or maybe even a video of the orgy.
For a long time, he thought, I’ve been nowhere, and now I’m finally also here physically.
He stood in front of the window and looked at the mountains in the mist, the empty road. Then he noticed a man fiddling with a dilapidated sign with only the letters T E BL E LAG ON on it. Some of the letters must have fallen off.
Did I get this from Dad? he wondered. His father hadn’t left him his artistic talent, but he had, apparently, left him instead with the irony of his movies and certain character traits.
Old Martin stopped going to the club just when he should have been taking advantage of the way he’d talked shit about things he shouldn’t have during socialism. He must have believed in the justice of the system, thought Nikola, so he’d paid his dues and could sing the blues. Old Martin could afford to be that way; he’d had his Venice and the festivals, they were his backup.
During the time after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nikola couldn’t fathom what happened to his old man, why he would always say, “I can’t,” whenever Nikola suggested they go to Mrok. Since everyone had always known that Martin was dancing on the edge, he could have become one of the gray-haired dissidents—there was a shortage of them, anyway. Everybody asked after him.
Sometimes Nikola insisted, because tennis had been their bonding ritual, but his dad wriggled out of it using all sorts of excuses—he’d say tennis was bad for his back, not the game for him anymore.
One time, his old man even gave a problematic interview to a newspaper—luckily, not for a high-circulation paper—resulting in him being dubbed the “old Commie” by Nikola’s circle of friends. By then all sorts of people were labeled Commies, and Nikola lost his temper, because his old man had never been in the Party.
“He was exactly the same before, while everyone else kept their mouths shut!” said Nikola, upset by the comment.
Hey, relax, will you look at him, they snickered. They didn’t care. Nikola knew that, but still he didn’t like hearing the phrase “old Commie.” It was not advisable to use it at the club, even as a joke, especially in front of older Mrokers, mostly businessmen who’d actually been Communists—or rather, members of the Party, because none of them were Communists out of conviction, of course, but only out of expedience. In fact, at the end of the day, hardly anyone had ever been a Communist.
Along with the ones who weren’t Communists, a certain number of those who weren’t Fascists belonged to the club as well. There were doubts about this, especially abroad, but they all agreed that was enemy propaganda. Those who weren’t Fascists had mostly moved back from somewhere else, and sometimes, or so it seemed to Nikola, the veins in their neck and the gnashing of their teeth conveyed how they felt about those who weren’t Communists.
They didn’t seem to believe each other about not being what they claimed not to be. At times an epilogue to World War II seemed to be underway in some magical sense, but that was just an impression—since one group wasn’t Fascist and the other wasn’t Communist, this was extremely difficult to keep tabs on.
Realistically, there was no quarrel—in the end, everyone would say they supported patriotism, democracy, and market competition. And Prime Minister Izvolski was like a magical bridge between them. He united everything because he had gone through many phases during his long life; historically, he was versatile.
Besides, he was also a neighbor, a member of the club, for whom Nikola had been throwing balls during the man’s dissident phase. Nikola hadn’t been aware of this at the time, but it was an indisputable fact: Nikola had been helping him when nobody else would. Now there were too many of them eager to throw him balls.
Nikola’s personality stopped him from ever telling Prime Minister Izvolski that he had once thrown balls to him, because he thought everybody would think he had an ulterior motive for mentioning it.
Furthermore, he’d liked the man at the time, portly and stern as he was. There were times when Nikola smiled at him, and the man even tried to smile back, looking like a kid, embarrassed about never having learned how to laugh
. However, since Nikola was much smaller than he was, the man got over feeling sheepish, and sometimes he’d let out a real laugh, his mouth atwist, which only made this more amusing for both of them. Then they’d both roar with laughter and Nikola was able to see what a funny kid Izvolski must have been, but nobody else was allowed to see.
In a way this was another reason why Nikola couldn’t tell Prime Minister Izvolski that he had been the one who threw balls to him—Izvolski was no longer funny, and Nikola didn’t want to find him funny, so he felt as if pushing his way through to him and telling him about the balls would instantly falsify the whole memory.
If it came to that he could always tell the prime minister he was the kid he’d laughed with—he’d known even as a child how rare this was for Izvolski—and both at Mrok and in society in general, this card up Nikola’s sleeve gave him a sense of security.
Meanwhile, Nikola figured his dad felt this was a new gang hanging out at Mrok now, which must be the reason why his old man didn’t go there anymore. Once, he told him who still went there, thinking he’d win him over, but his dad just said, “I can’t. I can’t look at them.”
Yes, that’s what I inherited from him, he thought, sitting in the director’s office at the old turbine factory. Maybe I really didn’t have what it took, but I definitely was not the only one . . . This trait from him—it was my undoing.
Someone knocked at the door.
“Yes?”
Sobotka.
After greeting Nikola, the engineer watched him for a moment as he sat in the director’s chair in the empty office. On the floor, next to some scattered papers and binders, lay only a few old phonograph records.
Sobotka gave him a sheet of paper and said, “This is a list of the things we need, in detail.”
Then he stared at the records; the top one said Spartacus.
“Whose records are these, anyway?” Nikola asked.
“The factory’s.”
“I’d offer you some coffee, but the renovation of this department is going a bit slower than expected.”
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