Nikola formally rubber-stamped all of it, but, in truth, he’d be lying if he said he knew how it all operated on the inside. He thought to himself that it was all a jumble, but he didn’t want to interfere too much, nor did he have anything constructive to say. They all knew each other, and they knew the substance at hand better.
“All right, so if Sobotka were to catch the flu tomorrow, is there anyone who could control the process instead?” Nikola asked Branoš.
“It wouldn’t be easy, but we’d manage,” said Branoš. Then, what Nikola feared most happened: Tanja, the museum director, walked in and parked herself beside him at the bar. Branoš, considerate gentleman that he was, immediately moved away, thinking Nikola and the museum director should be left alone.
She smiled like the six o’clock news anchor and said, “How are you today?”
Nikola rose to his feet and said, “Busy, gotta go!”
He felt both miserable and furious for having to evade the museum director, but he had already tried the boredom ploy and felt that every counterattack would lead to complications in their relationship.
Fleeing was the only option. She sighed, “Where are you going?”
“Busy.”
As he walked away, he imagined himself in a brief flash of self-pity as a cartoon character running from a boot with kitten heels.
On his way out, he heard her saying, “Now that is not gentlemanly.”
As soon as he set foot on the street, his mind was singing the song: If my daddy could see me nowww . . . If my daddy could see me noww . . . He couldn’t get it out of his ear. He strode along, slightly shaking his head. Getting wasted, getting wasted . . . Seven shots of Jäger . . .
He bought six beers on his way home, sat in his rented living room, drank in silence, and mournfully checked Facebook. He realized that, since he’d stopped posting, he felt like those people who go out but don’t drink: you just watch everyone else drinking and having fun while mildly embarrassing themselves.
He turned on the TV.
He caught a report about the oldest resident of this or the neighboring county, he didn’t quite understand. “Old Hajra is one hundred and three years old, she had ten children and a total of ninety-three direct descendants,” he heard.
He still had the “TV professional” disorder, so an image of the tedious office meeting where this report was approved came to mind for a moment.
He watched: a village, a cottage, a meadow, and all the living relatives gathered for the shoot. They were standing like a huge team in front of a shanty, with Old Hajra in the middle.
Old Hajra had a wizened face and sunken mouth, and couldn’t have been taller than five feet. She said something into the outstretched microphone, but Nikola couldn’t catch it, so he thought he must already be drunk. Still, he doubted he’d understand her even if he were sober, which gave him enough reason to frown and protest the reporting technique. “Everyone says Old Hajra was never a woman of many words, but she has great results under her belt,” said the reporter. The camera pulled back and the assemblage of offspring stood in front of the cottage. Old Hajra moved forward toward the meadow, closer to the camera, she slowly sank to her knees and Nikola thought she might be about to strike a yoga pose.
The moment felt as if there’d be an unexpected outcome.
“And even at one hundred and three years of age,” concluded the reporter, “Old Hajra prostrates herself in prayer with ease!”
Nikola was finishing his fourth beer and the remaining two seemed less than enough. He thought he definitely wouldn’t live to be Old Hajra’s age.
Then he imagined what that would be like—to bury his whole generation and a few of the younger ones? How lonely.
We’re all going to die soon, he thought.
But then, getting his fifth beer from the fridge, he thought how, in a way, he had so far lived his life as though he’d live forever.
What am I doing?
Luckily, the gas station was open. Suddenly, Nikola wanted to drink Jäger.
He sank into a depression for the next few days. He avoided the Blue Lagoon, going only to the factory, where trucks full of parts and materials, which Oleg was sending to them according to Sobotka’s instructions, frequently arrived.
When he entered the Lagoon for the first time in ten days, he expected to see the museum director parked and waiting for him, but Šeila was standing in the very same spot by the bar.
Delighted, he approached her directly and said, “Now this really is a pleasant surprise!”
Then, he realized she couldn’t have followed his train of thought and he might’ve been approaching her too aggressively.
For a second, she seemed to be staring at him as if seeing him for the first time. Still, she answered with a smile, “Nice.”
He realized this made him look more relaxed than he really was. Sometimes people perceive you as more relaxed than you really are and that’s a help: the whole thing starts running more smoothly. He was asking ordinary questions and getting ordinary answers (“Waiting for someone?”—“No,” etc.) but there was something in the overall tone of the answers that made him feel so alive, as if he had a reason to be there. He looked at her and thought that she shone.
Shining, something he hadn’t hoped to find here. “Now, everything looks better,” he said after a pause that wasn’t awkward.
“What?” Again, she was sizing him up as if she weren’t quite sure what she was looking at.
“You know, like with TV back in the old days. When you moved something and the reception improved.”
“Oh,” she smiled, “you’re looking for an antenna.”
“Don’t move.”
• • •
He watched Šeila sleep on the sofa bed in his house. This town looked better covered in fine snow, he thought, maybe the last snow before spring.
They hadn’t made love. As the saying goes, “nothing happened.”
He’d asked her to come over for a nightcap that night, and she did, with no sexual drama, the usual test signals, the hemming and hawing, with no fear of him, she just said, “Okay, we’ll talk and that’s all.” It wasn’t exactly clear what Šeila did for a living. She’d tried her hand at all sorts of things, she said. She had even been a manager once, but in an illusion, which sounded like thinking back on failure. She didn’t say any more about that, so he realized she was still looking for her place under the sun. It hit him that he might have gotten slightly carried away. Maybe he said too much about himself, maybe he should have painted a better picture and not talked about how he was riding on Oleg’s coattails, even though he tried to pass this off as a joke. Never mind. He would have told the story differently in his hometown; he would have played the game and tried to cover his position. He would’ve circled, twisted everything around until eventually even he wouldn’t know what he was talking about or who he was representing—himself or a version of himself for public consumption. As if you’re fulfilling other people’s expectations of who you’re supposed to be until, he thought, even you yourself don’t know who you are: you’re only throwing yourself into the web we weave for each other. Why continue the charade in front of this woman who shines, he thought, here at the end of the world? Why not just talk, and then even caught himself off guard with what he was saying; exploring a whole new story, the world created when two people really talk.
She seemed to feel the same way about talking with him because, laughing, she said, “I had a love affair that, you know, disoriented me. After that I didn’t know who I was anymore, or who I was when I was in love, I didn’t know who I was, see? I’m still not sure, but maybe I was what people call a gold digger.”
When he heard this he realized she wasn’t afraid to talk.
“It’s the relationship, I realize, the ‘who are you’ stuff . . . It’s not just you. It’s many relationships. B
ut there’s always one that stands out, something always stands out and takes you far away. And if that something abandons you, you’re disoriented like a soldier after a war.”
“Damn it if this country doesn’t look as if the war abandoned it,” he said, half-drunk.
“But even you don’t know what to grab on to. I see you don’t like being at home. Look, here you can become someone else.” She laughed.
“And who might I become?”
“Well—you!” she said, through her laughter.
“Ah, my you,” he said, using a local phrase he’d picked up, and they both laughed even more than the humor deserved. The way a man and a woman laugh, using the excuse of a joke.
He thought about the conversation.
Through the window he watched the postman striding along officially from front gate to front gate. The man walked as if he were at the center of the world, the deputy of the state: the postman, who still believed—you could see this on his face—that somewhere there, at the center, the system was up and running.
10
ONCE, WHEN SHE was still sitting next to Jasmina at school, Šeila won the district chemistry contest: the formulas came together in her head as if she could see them, and she scored a perfect 100 percent. The runner-up had a score of 41 percent. They called her a genius and took pride in her at school and at family gatherings, but then the war started and lasted until the end of her high school years. If what passed for school during the war could even be called school. When it ended, she wanted to enroll in the university in the capital city, but her parents, once in the middle class, were now poor. Her father lost his job; her mother worked as an accountant at the water utility, with a salary that would barely have covered the cost of the student dorm and cafeteria along with their own living expenses. “And what about the books, the living allowance, the clothes. You’re not going to walk around naked,” they said.
She would talk about how brilliant she was at chemistry, especially in the company of guests and relatives because she realized her parents were the most vulnerable to criticism then. She harped on chemistry even though she didn’t care about it anymore. During the war, she’d joined a drama club, dabbled in writing, and dreamed of the wide world. “Your head is in the clouds,” said her mother. They didn’t let her leave during the first year after the war ended. Maybe they weren’t sure it was really over. But someone soon told them that Šeila was starting to hang out with the town’s weed-smoking “druggies.” So, to stop Šeila from throwing the year away with the space cadets, they allowed her to go to the capital city, as long as she promised to stick with chemistry. They weren’t going to scrimp and save so she could squander the year. Microbiology would do. They’d asked around and heard that microbiology would give her a firm footing, and later she could work for the water utility or possibly handle blood samples in a lab. There will always be a need for that, they said. So she enrolled in a degree program in microbiology, hoping that something would happen in the meantime, and maybe she’d meet a stranger who’d save her from this world.
After the war, there were foreigners in the capital city engaged in calming the situation down, involved with humanitarian work, establishing order. So she and her friend Alma, a student who was a year older than she and who knew her way around the city, went to the places where the foreigners hung out and ordered Coca-Colas. They spent their weekend nights at this one basement club, actually, and didn’t drink only Coca-Cola. They were invited to parties where there would also sometimes be coke, which Šeila was afraid of, while Alma wasn’t so cautious. Šeila saw how men acted freely around Alma. So Šeila would sometimes have to wait for Alma, who slipped out for a while. Whenever Šeila tried to talk about this with Alma, her reply was, “It’s not like that.” Still, Alma seemed to be the one who was getting invited everywhere while people tolerated Šeila. Something like: she’s pretty, let her sit here; she’ll probably relax sooner or later.
She had a knack for the microbiology thing, however, because she somehow made it into second year. Alma said, “You have it easy, you’ve never fallen in love.” Alma failed the year because, in her words, unfortunately she was in love with a Spaniard who worked for the United Nations. He did not join his life with Alma’s. Instead, one day he told her he’d been transferred and he’d call her, maybe even have her join him after he’d had a look at the situation there. He never called. Yes, that’s how things stood.
Back then, Šeila began thinking she should stop hanging out with Alma because everything in Alma’s life seemed to be headed in the wrong direction and she’d end up with anyone who had a little cocaine in his pocket. Yet all the while, Alma was feeling unhappy and neglected. You couldn’t focus on one thing at a time when talking with her; their conversations ranged across a hundred topics and everything was scrambled together. This rattled Šeila’s logical mind. There were always men at the parties who hit on Šeila, and once she even gave in to an Italian who seemed harmless enough because she wanted to lose her virginity to a man like that. But she didn’t fall in love with him. His name was Marcello, and he didn’t fall in love with her, either, possibly because he, too, didn’t enjoy the sex, which they’d only barely managed. Still, he wanted to continue seeing her; he must have figured she owed him for all the hassle, though he used nicer words. They saw each other a few more times; she was out to learn something about sex. When Marcello told her, after a few months, that he was leaving for another country, she didn’t expect he’d let her know what the situation there was like. This surprised Alma, but Šeila said to her, “He was only a lover to me.”
“Look at you, everyone thinks you’re a nerd, but look! I can’t believe it! Only a lover?”
Alma was shocked by Šeila’s response, though Šeila couldn’t understand why, given that Alma’d been with many more lovers than she. The difference was that Alma was always hoping they’d be boyfriends, too. Although, at least from Šeila’s perspective, they, obviously, were just lovers. Šeila even thought this had something to do with intelligence, that Alma was unable to put two and two together because of the chaos in her mind. But when Alma said, “Well! I’m impressed, but I could never do that,” Šeila was shocked and came to realize this wasn’t a question of intelligence: Alma was resisting putting two and two together. She wanted to believe in her image of herself as a good girl who’d unfortunately fallen in love over and over again because she wasn’t born under a lucky star. Šeila saw that Alma desperately wanted to lie to herself. Šeila then told her, “Do what you want, but I’m emancipated,” without even knowing where she’d picked up the word.
Sometimes, when out with friends, Alma teased Šeila for her use of the word: “Šeila will tell you. She’s emancipated.” Šeila couldn’t figure out why Alma was clinging to this, why she thought it was funny. If there was a local wiseass present, he’d invariably ask, “And what are you emancipated from, for God’s sake?”
From you and your questions, she longed to say more than once. But she was afraid of making trouble, so she answered, “Legends.”
“Hear that? Legends?” they laughed. “What does that mean?”
“Just kidding.”
“Old stories, you mean?”
She kept her mouth shut, but she didn’t like the way most of the local men talked with her, their bossy tone, how they saw themselves, because most of them were legends. And those who weren’t, wished they were.
She would have loved to laugh about this with someone. But she didn’t have anyone for that. She found things easier with foreigners, almost like living abroad: nobody ever preached at you or scolded you. This was why she put up with Alma, while waiting for something to happen. And happen it did. He was not only an American but—and this came as another shock for Alma—an African American. In fact, Michael was not an average African American: his mother was black, and his father Taiwanese. If you looked at him closely (which she most certainly did), you could s
ee his slightly slanting eyes and his smooth, soft skin. Simply put, he was beautiful to her, and quiet and unobtrusive, too, maybe even a little sad because Alma and the other women who hung out with them didn’t really talk with Michael: they didn’t actually see him. Because if you’re having sex with a white man who buys you presents and pays your rent (as in Alma’s case), nobody notices. But if the man is black, people probably do notice. She’d never thought people there were racists because nobody ever spoke of themselves as racists; still, people often asked her, “Really?” Then they eyed her to see if one of her legs was shorter or she had some other defect.
“Really.”
Michael had just turned thirty. He worked for an agency that promoted the free market. She fell in love with him and he with her, or so it seemed. No, actually—and to this day she was certain—it didn’t just seem. He was genuinely in love, but their relationship became burdened with drama because he was married, a fact he’d initially kept from her and only later confessed. He confessed and wept. Wept because he was in love. He was miserable because he was in love. She didn’t know something like this could happen, and she liked him even more in his misery and felt sorry for the American man who was suffering: his life had come undone, despite being so smoothly organized. He’d married right before coming here to prove to his American girlfriend, whom he’d been dating for years, that nothing would get in their way.
Now he told Šeila he could no longer lie to his wife over the phone, he was finding this unbearable and he was going crazy, he must get a divorce. While he was telling her this he had the look of someone who was trapped. He felt incredibly guilty for what he’d done to his wife.
No-Signal Area Page 13