“Well, yes. I have workers who are knowledgeable . . . I trust them.”
“Don’t fuck with me! You’re ‘employing people.’ You ‘trust them’? Are you turning into a patron of the working class now?”
“Ah, ‘Don’t fuck with me’” he said, quoting her: “So, how do you see our relationship?”
“Aw shut up! Those are my lines,” she said, grinning. “You’re not very bright, are you?”
“Well, look,” he said, trying to come up with what to say next, “maybe I have turned into a patron of the working class. And why not?”
He thought he could defuse this with humor, but she planted her chin on her fist and seemed unwilling to relent. “I can’t follow what you’re saying. Or what you’re doing for that matter.”
“This is really bugging you, isn’t it?”
Her expression was uneasy, and it occurred to him that this might be bothering her because of something going on in her life. She’d often spoken of layoffs at her company, and while she agreed with them, they made her anxious.
“They wanted capitalism. They voted for it, didn’t they?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But when you give them capitalism, it’s oh poor them, this isn’t what they bargained for.”
She was struggling with this, he thought, because she felt a little guilty.
He’d been over it all before. He knew where he stood. If they made the turbines and this relationship lasted, if they happened to buy a house, have a garden, a baby, he’d do what he could to explain his thinking to her. For now, there wasn’t much point in trying to explain to her how, once the workers’ enthusiasm was fully exploited, he’d fire them all at the same time.
Maybe all of this was the reason why he did not really want to go down there.
This job, he thought, is textbook globalization. Capital waltzes in, takes what it needs, and leaves. But here he was compelled to assert the opposite, it just so happened, as if he were a socialist visionary.
“You know, it’s an experiment of sorts in business and morality . . .”
“You’re being weird. All I know is that this goes against everything I thought of you,” she said, staring at him as if he were some kind of poet.
He had the urge to laugh.
He had never thought about this before, but he was slowly realizing that he would have to play a sort of business bohemian, an eccentric dreamer, a social experimenter, an anti-capitalist activist—one of the above. He had not shared the entire business plan with anyone, not even Nikola. Nikola was the only person who knew that the turbines were being built for the Colonel, but not even he knew they’d only be building two of them and then shuttering the factory. Nikola might blurt something after the fifth beer, or his melancholy could take over, and he’d accidentally let the workers know they were going overboard with their enthusiasm.
Of course, the buyer’s country was never mentioned anywhere. American intelligence was present all through this area; they had the region in the palm of their hand, and if anyone were to suspect that the turbines were being built for the Colonel, the local politicians would change their tune and the whole thing would be blocked by the invisible hand. The invisible hand of the market—the expression came to him—yes, the invisible hand of the free market would definitely come down on his shoulder and say: Wait a minute, bro, the market is not that free.
None of this could be leaked to Lorena. She was focused on her own little world and wanted to get through a successful life according to the standards of the confined society to which she belonged. She would gain nothing from the information. Telling her would only lighten the burden on him because he wouldn’t be forced to play the part.
This was maddening sometimes: nobody knowing what you were doing, not saying what was on your mind. And if you never spoke of it, maybe it didn’t even exist: the idea never came back to you, as if you didn’t have a reflection in the mirror of others. He looked at Lorena and thought, Light goes through me, I’m not there in her eyes; what she sees is merely my silhouette.
He was living in such a vacuum. This is why he constantly had to keep his eye on the compass, always to know exactly where he was, always to gauge his position, and this drew him into local and world problems and sometimes he checked over every detail obsessively. A few years ago in Vienna, each time he was on the metro, he would feel out of breath and break out suddenly in a sweat, as if he were afraid of drowning in his own thoughts. He would shoot out of the metro and hungrily gulp in the air. He solved this problem by taking taxis. Considering the expense, he thought, I’d be better off with a good shrink. But would he find a trustworthy one? Perhaps he was reluctant to share his life story with anyone else. When he was in Berlin, he would hang out with buoyant young people, as if he were one of them. Once he was asked why he never used the underground, since they thought taxis were bourgeois, so he just smiled and said, “I have too many acquaintances in the underworld. Maybe some of them are in hell, too. I avoid it.”
One woman took him seriously, so he told her: “Just kidding.”
“No you’re not,” she said, and looked at him.
She obviously had unique powers. He usually felt that people’s gazes missed him altogether. Like Lorena’s today.
She was still reclining at the foot of the bed, her chin propped on her fist, looking at him in a particular way, as if he were a poet who’d suddenly dropped in, uninvited, as the prince of business on his white horse.
“Come on. This goes against everything you used to think of me? Well, fine,” he said with a grin. “Then do tell what you used to think, now that it’s moot.”
“Hmm.” She was deep in thought. “What I thought?” She looked up at the ceiling, like someone trying to recall something they hadn’t studied enough. “Let’s say . . . that I thought you were . . .. you were . . . Um . . . A professional!”
Not bad, he thought before saying, “What’s that supposed to mean? That all I care about is work and money? Is that what you think?” Now he was really interested in what she’d say next. Because if all he cared about was work, what did she even want with him?
“Yes,” she said. “I thought you were utterly alone, hermetically sealed, selfish.”
“Is that what you liked about me?”
“Gee, you’re really making me think,” she said. “I liked the smell of the beast.”
Wasn’t expecting that, he thought.
She then laughed at the sentence, throwing her head back. She sat up on the bed, took a cigarette from the nightstand, and lit it.
She looked him in the eye, as if trying to reach behind the mask, and said, “I thought you were a beast.”
He stared at her breasts, watching them breathe.
“Well, I am,” he said in a different voice. “Come here!”
8
NIKOLA WAS SITTING on a barstool in the Blue Lagoon, leaning against the wall at the corner of the bar, thinking about how the place’s name contradicted its location in every possible way. This bar, which was closer to the factory than anywhere else, was named—and this was apparent from the framed and very yellowed poster—after a teen movie set somewhere on Fiji, a movie Nikola had seen years before when he belonged to Brooke Shields’s target audience. Back then, he wanted a girlfriend who looked like her. Today, he thought, Brooke is full of Botox, and he was sitting here in the Blue Lagoon like nothing had changed, possibly waiting for the love of his life, whoever she was, bewildered while overseeing the renovation of the factory, which, he had to admit, was going miraculously well. Sobotka said yesterday that the repairs were nearly done. This was all being handled without Oleg, the great maestro of the game, who kept saying, “Splendid, I’m handling everything at my end, I’m closing deals,” over the phone, but obviously was not inclined to keep Nikola company at the Blue Lagoon. So Nikola was left to brainstorm about God-
knows-what in this time capsule of a bar. Why, for example, did the chain-wearing eighties fashion relic, the owner, name a bar next to a factory the Blue Lagoon?
The more Nikola thought about it, the more it made sense in that, as far as he remembered, the whole movie took place after a shipwreck. But back in the eighties, when naming the bar, the owner was not thinking “shipwreck.” He was thinking: escape as far away as possible, all the way to the Pacific.
As if the owner had been wishing there was no factory, thought Nikola, no industry, probably along with his entire generation. Nikola would not have given the bar in N. such an idiotic name, but, just like the owner, he probably would have done anything to create a different kind of mood. Now, after the owner’s business had gone under, he dusted off Brooke Shields, jumped on the wave of factory renovation, and was living off them. What else was he to do?
“Rafo, maybe you could rename the place the ‘Blue Collar’?” suggested Nikola. The owner liked to chat with Nikola. From Rafo’s perspective, he and Nikola talked to each other like two slightly depressed entrepreneurs stymied by the socialist legacy. Rafo had worked in Germany and had no doubt whatsoever that Nikola shared his opinions, since they were both businessmen.
This was the way the owner understood Nikola’s remark about the name of the bar as well, as if they were weighing a business idea as colleagues, an idea which he—for a reason he couldn’t quite explain—didn’t like.
“Eh, I guess I prefer the Blue Lagoon. From a business point of view, too . . .”
“But can’t you see you only get workers here? There aren’t any teenage girls,” Nikola said, teasing him in a mock-serious tone.
“You never know.”
“You have to admit, what matters most in business is to have vision,” said Nikola, realizing he was talking like Oleg.
If Oleg were here, he’d take over the conversation with anybody who crossed their path. But Nikola was learning that he, too, was capable of performing in that arena. In a way, he was enjoying Oleg’s absence.
True, there were no teenagers around, but Nikola noticed that the Blue Lagoon attracted women who’d been teenagers in Brooke Shields’s day, and had aged naturally, no Botox, though that didn’t mean they were acting naturally. They were a little stiff, decently done up according to the standards of their small town, and they came in groups of at least three, sometimes four. On Fridays there would be five or six of them, and seemed to be all from an unusual subculture. Their presence was, however, refreshing and even surprising, since most of the town’s bars were populated exclusively by men. The factory’s workers, Nikola noticed, would instantly perk up when the ladies walked in. Their presence was a kind of compliment to these until-recently unemployed men since, instead of avoiding them, the ladies might be interested in having fun with them again. The women were on the shy side and stuck together, but after a few drinks there was the occasional high-pitched laugh, along with hesitant, playful looks. Nikola noticed, perhaps a bit presumptuously, that he drew these hesitant looks more than the others, always followed, for some reason, by giggles. Since some of the brave women, when they approached the bar, ordered their drinks while standing right next to him, he gradually met all of them and also learned that the crew of teenagers from the time of The Blue Lagoon consisted mostly of unmarried public-sector employees who’d continued coming here because of work. What can you do? One of them, Tanja, had told him this the other night at the bar. She was, as she said, the director of the town museum, which he should, they agreed, visit as soon as possible: it was a small museum and easy to tour. “Most of the time there isn’t anybody there,” she’d said to him in a voice with a hint of the sensual. So he imagined himself for a moment at this imaginary museum, clumsily leaning on an exhibit, perhaps a stuffed mammoth (he had no idea where the image was from), or perhaps a priceless stone baptismal font, or under a yellowing imperial charter, stained like an old porn magazine. He imagined himself fucking the museum director in the tense silence, because there’d be no one there, and all of history would be theirs, hot, wet, and lustful. Lust and the museum. That was what he thought this Brooke Shields with a few wrinkles smelled like. No, she really isn’t ugly, he thought, she’s attractive in a way.
“It’s not far from here,” she said coyly.
“Yes, yes, I should stop by. I love history,” he said.
“Historia magistra vitae est,” she added. He thought of Pompeii and the eruption of Vesuvius, of all the apocalyptic sex. He had to admit it now—he’d really been in a dry spell. Besides the museum director, the group also numbered the head of the town library, an attorney working at the town hall (he had heard someone call her “the head honcho”), an English teacher at the primary school who was also a poet (“no, really,” he’d been told), a veterinarian, who joined the group when she was not out in the field, and a dentist, who had maybe even brought them there in the first place, since she’d been seeing more patients since the factory started working again. This was the female intellectual elite of the town, he realized, a mighty group that the men from the factory were hesitantly eyeing. All the directors, the libraries and the museums, the town hall, the poetry, and the dentist’s chair—they probably intimidated the local men merely by their positions, which was probably why they were still single into their thirties and forties. The English teacher-poet was the youngest, in her mid-thirties, and the veterinarian was in her mid-forties but very athletic, so much so he’d thought there must be a gym hidden away somewhere in town. She was the only one dressed casually, while the others preferred to wear plain woolen jackets and suits under their fur coats—because it was still fucking cold—along with boots with kitten heels, like careful politicians touring mountain municipalities.
Nikola watched them every time, trying to decide which to focus on, though none of them genuinely appealed to him, but as a group, except for the plump attorney from the town hall whom he dismissed out of hand, they all intrigued him, each in her way, so he eyed them now and then as a group, creating, he sensed, added tension because they must have felt he couldn’t decide which one to choose. He thought this was why each of them—as she was approaching the bar or going to the bathroom—moved as though in slow motion, or in a reality TV show. Each one of them had her own style and her own idea of femininity, too pronounced perhaps, with a flair for spontaneous acting, playful elegance, a few dainty steps, a shy lack of confidence, and other signs that depressed him. The veterinarian was the only one who strode along as if she didn’t care. Despite her athletic build, the expression of her face was tough: more like Clint Eastwood than Brooke Shields. But, he thought, as the years passed, these differences cease to matter.
He found them attractive as a group but not as individuals, and he was torn. If he offered them group sex, he thought, he’d surely provoke a scandal that would be talked about for centuries. Besides, he wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway. But, on which one should he focus? And, should he even involve himself with any of them at all, because he had the feeling he wouldn’t fall in love, he didn’t know if, realistically speaking, sex was possible here without emotional entanglements.
Maybe the veterinarian after all?
Maybe, but . . . He’d visited the town museum earlier today, and now he wondered if he’d already made a mess of things.
Tanja, the director, was of course already there and was very flustered when he appeared, as if her house were a mess, and the museum was of course deadly quiet and immaculate, and there really was nobody there—where were these people she was in charge of, he wondered—so he had the privilege of being expertly guided through local history. There’d been all sorts of things in the jumble of history, the West, the East, the middle, the Celts had mined ore here in primeval times, the ancient Romanized tribes had disappeared leaving a few traces, a handful of words and names were left, said the director breathlessly, the Bogomils were buried under standing stones, and there were
many more, she said, many people who’d been persecuted and sought refuge in these mountains because the hordes and armies thundered through the valleys and raised hell, and the governing was done in the valleys, and the hordes and armies couldn’t penetrate the mountains quite as easily, so many people who wanted to hide from the world, the army, the government wandered through them, and they lived in seclusion as they pleased, and this is a strange region, strange, she said, “you’ll see, sir, or maybe you won’t because it can’t all be taken in at first glance.”
“Tanja, may I call you by your first name?”
“Well, I guess.” She blushed again, feeling she’d misread his intentions, and he didn’t know what to say or do to put her at her ease, and her edginess was infectious: he thought how he should have gone for a drink or two beforehand and then come, but he’d been more focused on taking a shower and, foolishly, showed up sober, and he was much more susceptible, sober, to the museum’s atmosphere where their steps creaked and he could even hear her breathing, but not in a sexy way. More asthmatic. Maybe she really was asthmatic. Maybe she was ashamed of taking out the spray and inhaling it? Or maybe she thought she wasn’t dressed as nicely as she’d like? Who knows what kind of fuss was going through her mind, he thought, so he decided to give her some time. “Where’s the gents?” he said.
She waved her hand in the general direction, as if she’d been given a reprieve, and he went into the bathroom and decided to stay there a little longer. He messaged Oleg: “How’s it going with buying the parts and materials? Hurry. We’ll need them soon. I’m in the town museum washroom waiting for nothing in particular. Sincerely yours, Niks.” He also messaged his childhood friend Vito, who was in Washington, where he’d escaped from the crowds of New York. They messaged back and forth on a quarterly basis: “I’m up in the mountains where many shady characters hide out. Don’t fire at us from there.”
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