From that partly enclosed ditch, bare-chested and scorched by the sun, he’d watch women in summer dresses walk down the sidewalk. If one of them noticed him, she quickly looked away and hurried off, as if faced by a threat from below, even though he didn’t glower at them in a threatening manner, but was more like a troubadour under a balcony. But he was no troubadour, nor was he under a balcony. He was a grunt in a ditch, and they, who were walking down the street in their summer dresses, avoided exchanging glances. Maybe this was because he was bare-chested, strong, and tanned. But wasn’t that the reason nice guys went to the beach and to the gym?
Maybe, but there was that barrier of dust, of yellowish dirt hiding under the sidewalk, there was the rung on the class ladder, and Erol knew this without thinking about it. He was down in the ditch, and his gazes from below seemed more brazen than normal, almost as though they were from a wartime trench.
Erol had been in the trenches as well and he could compare the two, indeed the two began to merge for him under the sun, in the dizziness under the sun, with the constant bursts of clatter of the heavy drilling machines pulverizing the dark tarmac. Back in the trenches, he thought then, always the dirty mission, the body at work, while others walk around up there and run superior errands. And that’s how it’ll be for you until you kick the bucket, because you have no education, and you don’t have it because you were in the trenches, because they handed you a weapon and you took it, just like you’re taking these tools.
He was a hard worker, but Erol had been considered a lazy bum at school. He was one of those problems the professors took a shine to, a student they tested with a smile, keen to give him a passing grade. But he enjoyed being the problem; it was part of his image and, come to think of it, that was what led him to run away from school at the age of seventeen, and the excitement he felt at holding a Kalashnikov for the first time. He felt like a king; because before that he hadn’t been accepted into the regular unit, but then Ragan and his unit showed up in another town. Military or paramilitary, Erol didn’t care, as long as they let him join and didn’t ask about his age; he was already one of the bigger troublemakers in town—before the war, he’d resold tickets for The Silence of the Lambs and Terminator 2—and he realized that, once the war started, this was the game he’d have to get into if he wanted to maintain his status. It was impossible to remain both a hotshot and a civilian, he understood that.
There was no other choice—no better choice—than Ragan, who had come to the region from somewhere else, where he had, according to rumors, shot a high-ranking commander who’d wanted to “straighten out” his unit. Erol really liked the sound of this, although Ragan himself told him later he hadn’t wanted to shoot the commander, but to shoot over his head. But he forgot he had fragmenting munitions in his grenade launcher, and that’s what took the guy out.
Ragan was about forty. Before the war he’d done time in five different European countries, so he spoke foreign languages; he was muscular and had long black hair like a rock star. Erol thought of him as a man of the world.
When he arrived—on a motor scooter with a friend from school who quickly drove back—at the hotel above the ski resort where they’d installed themselves, Ragan looked Erol over for a while, patted him gently on the cheek, and said, “Kid, you’ll be here and I’ll look after you.” This made Ragan’s crew laugh, and Erol didn’t know whether they were laughing at him or their leader’s humor. Doesn’t matter, he thought, I’ll show them.
On another occasion, Ragan said to Erol—he remembered the exact words—“Kid, I’ve got your back, but you watch mine, too: when I want to eat, drink, or fuck something, it’ll be up to you to fetch it.” That made everyone laugh, which wasn’t comfortable for Erol, but he felt Ragan actually was watching his back; even guys like Ragan had paternal instincts. This didn’t help Erol much in the end, however; he kept his mouth shut, rolled his eyes, and scowled quietly to show his disapproval of what had been going on at Ragan’s hotel, things he hadn’t expected; he’d imagined war as battles and gunfights when courage would be on display. When Ragan was slapping around a girl they’d brought in from the checkpoint, Erol sighed darkly and said, “Gotta go out.” He left, walked around the ditches, smoked, and came back, never asking a single question. If he hadn’t been a minor, they probably wouldn’t have let him get away with that, either, he later thought; he was expected to be with them throughout. This way, he was Ragan’s pet, uncorrupted, which in a way pleased Ragan, so he came up with a clumsy rhyme he repeated when drunk: “Erol’s such a goodie-goodie, hasn’t fucked, nor ever will he.”
Erol had grown up without a father, so everything about his relationship with Ragan touched a part of him he’d never known existed. He wanted to prove himself to Ragan. But he also had sympathy for unprotected women; he’d assumed the role of his mother’s protector as a child and understood a woman’s position in a deeper way, as her ally. This was not a clear attitude but more of a feeling, never voiced clearly because it wasn’t something to brag about to tough guys. Even in peacetime a line was drawn between the worlds; nothing feminine was allowed among men, as if the polarizing war had begun years before. Since he never articulated his alliance with women, he himself wasn’t fully aware of it. But after what happened to the girl, who he thought was pretty and whose documents he later found, soaking wet, by the junkyard, he became numb and distant, then restless again and prone to risk-taking. That was the only form of rebellion he knew: to not look after himself, as if secretly trying to get himself killed. He didn’t even know where it came from, he just felt torn between two desires.
One of the desires was—like a comic-book superhero—to protect women in distress. Here, however, this was tantamount to suicide and undoable because it would lead him to a clash with the group he wanted to be a part of. They’d accepted him as one of their own, even though some of the fellows told him he didn’t belong there. This showed that maybe they, too, belonged somewhere else, but like Erol, here they were.
This was how he realized he was no righteous hero; he suppressed these thoughts, which is why he wanted to prove himself even more by acting fearless in the face of the enemy. One day, from his window Ragan saw Erol in full gear heading for the woods, planning to cross the hill and get behind enemy lines. He pointed his gun at him: “Report to me at once!”
He arrived to find Ragan sitting in his apartment with a bottle of whisky. Ragan said: “You’re not easy to keep track of.”
“What can you do . . .” said Erol with a hint of pride.
“Don’t go there!”
“I was just reconnoitering . . .”
Ragan saw the kid loved him but didn’t fear him. “Don’t go there, I tell you! You’ll foul up a major deal!”
Erol now thought Ragan had had too much to drink. His eyes looked drunk, though his speech wasn’t slurred.
“What are you going there for?” Ragan had said. “I do business with them, for God’s sake.”
“Aren’t we at war with them?”
“Not right now. From here on out ask who you should attack. I’ve got business deals, understand?”
“Yup.”
“I’m a businessman, you know. Not just a bonehead.”
Erol stared at the floor. Ragan kept looking from the muted TV to Erol. Then he told him to bring himself a beer from the cooler and have a seat, which made Erol feel important. Not many people drank with Ragan in his apartment.
“How do you think this war will end? Who’ll win?”
“I hope it’s us.”
“I’ll win,” said Ragan. “And you won’t.”
Erol didn’t see where this conversation was heading, so he kept quiet.
“You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because you’re good,” Ragan said, laughing at him.
Erol, for some reason, felt ashamed, and Ragan looked at him as if wondering wh
at to do with the kid.
“You remind me of someone. This is what saved your ass.”
“Of whom?”
“Someone I owed something to. It’s not yours to know. It was a long time ago, even before you were born. When exactly were you born?”
Erol told him, and Ragan leaned back on his sofa and stared at the ceiling.
Then a folk singer appeared on the screen, a blonde, and Ragan grabbed the remote and turned up the volume.
“See her? She’s my bride-to-be.”
“Really? Gee, I didn’t know.”
“Neither does she.”
“Yeah?”
“Where are your folks from, Erol?”
Erol said where his mother was from.
“What about your father?”
“I use my mother’s last name,” muttered Erol.
“Is that so?” Ragan said, looking at him as if seeing him for the first time.
“He ran off somewhere, never heard from him again.”
“Where’d he go?”
“West.”
“Don’t you know his name?”
“I do.”
Erol said the name he didn’t love.
Ragan stared at the screen, at the singer he intended to marry, and said, “Incredible. Such beauty.”
Then he asked, still watching the TV, “So, what happened to him?”
“I don’t know.”
He turned to Erol and said, “You’re free to go.”
When Erol left, Ragan poured himself a scotch and stared at the chair Erol had been sitting in.
“Unbelievable!” he shouted at the chair.
A moment later he added, “I thought it was some kind of joke from the above when he showed up. And I look at him. He wants to be bad, with all his might he wants to be bad, but he’s good. I’m thinking, a joke sent from above because I couldn’t tell from his last name. And now . . . ha ha, this is unbelievable! How’d you find me? What is it that draws you people to me?”
Ragan was talking to the chair as if it were actually listening to him. He lit a cigarette.
“It’s true, my friend, I owe you. You took me with you out there and I thought, You’re a scoundrel. Not me, but you. I saw you have a heart and you’re not afraid. I even envied you. Oof,” he shook his head.
He poured himself more scotch.
“But heart and balls are not the same thing, my friend. When we started pimping whores I could tell you didn’t have the balls for it. Only your stupid heart. Not the way to run a business like this, my friend, you can’t. . . . To lift a hand against me, pal, for some beaten-up whore who didn’t make it. If only you’d picked up a gun, maybe you’d be here now. But to lift a hand against me, that boxing hand of yours, ah, ah, how foolish.”
He stopped, deep in thought.
“It wasn’t for you, and yet you pushed your way in. Just like this schmuck of yours wormed his way into my good graces, unbelievable. Same hand, same fool! He, too, wants to be bad and good. Why me? Is this a sign or what? What do I do with him now that I know who he is? Do I keep him or kill him? Tell me.
“Can you kill the same guy twice? I mean, I can, but since he doesn’t know anything, this is between me and you.
“He hates you. And I’m indebted to you for taking me on when I hadn’t yet become me. You created me.
“You created me—you, who wanted to be good and bad. But you can’t do that, pal, you’re either here or there. Suckers who join the bad guys get fucked in the end. What can you do? I’d really like to know if you, with that attitude of yours, are in hell or in heaven. About me there’s no doubt, I guess. Although, you know, it makes me want to play a combination, like in sports betting: 1/2. Not a draw, a draw is for you. And I’m thinking, if we’re not just fighting the enemy in this war, but also for God and our faith, as some say, will that earn me points? What would you say?
“I’m thinking, since I’ve always been a betting man, I’m thinking about the odds, so let’s say, given that there are three faiths at play here, if, let’s say, everybody’s playing for their own god, and if there’s only one god, I mean, there can’t be three, one of them must be the right one . . . Then each has a 33.3 percent chance that they’ve bet on the right one, and it’s 66.6 percent that they’ve bet on the wrong one. Bad odds. For those who root for their own and bet on who they root for. Not for serious players. Now look: even if I put my money on the right one, is my god gonna like what I’ve done? Let’s say—and this would be pretty optimistic for me—I’ve got a 50 percent chance, which breaks the 33.3 in half, which means I’ve got 16 or 17 percent from the get-go. For me that’s weak. And if any of these other gods exist, I’m sure they won’t like what I’ve done, so I’d be in for a pretty nasty treatment. In any case, the odds of me profiting in this are weak.
“And if there’s only one god for everyone, and he doesn’t care who’s who, he’ll just hold this against me. What would you say the odds are that there’s just one god and he doesn’t care who’s who? In any case, this just lowers my odds.
“So I have little chance for this to improve my end score. Which is why I’m running my little business on the side, I’m not one of those who are in the fight to the core.
“There’s no denying it: my deeds are my deeds. And you know, I feel I don’t owe anybody anything. I can murder and torch things . . . Even those who were only born yesterday can murder and torch things now. It’s weird to see how the fear has melted away. That’s starting to worry me, purely for technical reasons. Because, you know we used to build our image on those things. Even you could pretend. Now I have to become worse—I don’t enjoy it, believe me—so these amateurs don’t think they’ve reached my level. Why I feel indebted to you, I don’t know. Is it because these feelings are from the old me, before I became this man? For you, honestly, I felt bad because it wasn’t just you I was saying goodbye to. There weren’t many after you who loved me and didn’t fear me at the same time. But when I got rid of you, I became me, Ragan.”
After leaving Ragan’s apartment Erol fell into a glum mood, and later, when he tried to fall asleep, he started from his half-sleep with sudden concern about his mother, which haunted him all night.
When he ran away to join Ragan’s unit, Erol hadn’t wanted to call his mother at first because he was afraid to talk to her, and then the phone lines were down for a while. The day after his conversation with Ragan he finally managed to get through to her on a borrowed Motorola, and he was shocked by her quavering voice; she told him she was ill, the doctors believed she had cancer, there was no one to bring her food; they lived on the fourth floor and she said the elevator had been broken for over a month. He immediately left for N. without telling anyone. When he got there, he found his mother standing on her own two feet, and he was overjoyed. But then she told him she’d pulled some strings to have an ultrasound that morning. She had uterine cancer and she didn’t have much longer to live. She told him to put the Kalashnikov in the pantry so that she wouldn’t have to look at the damned thing, and have a seat and eat a little something. Later, when he went to his room, stretched out on the bed, and dozed off, he heard a click in the lock, but slept on, unable to face what this meant through his sleep.
She’d locked him in, he realized this later.
She locked him in, and when he woke and started pounding on the door, she tongue-lashed him with insults, the way only she could, while he, inside, screamed at the top of his lungs for her to let him out. He soon realized she’d pushed a chest, and probably many other things, up against the door, and all he could do was listen to her tirade. “You ungrateful dumbass! You ungrateful worthless shitface! You dipshit! Shame on you for abandoning your mother during the war! You piece of shit! Did I raise you for Ragan? I’m gonna shoot that son of a bitch with your gun! Just let them come looking for you! I’m gonna fucking kill that worthless pie
ce of shit, who is he to take my son?”
He was trying to say something . . .
“And as for you, asshole, shut up in there! Shut up, I don’t want to hear a word from you! And don’t even think about smashing down my door!”
He pounded on the door with his fists and head. Apparently she’d piled things up on top of the chest, too, he could tell by the sound. At one point, he broke down and started howling like a baby, at first because he was miserable for being locked in, and then the misery took hold of him and he sobbed for everything he’d seen, because of what he’d known and hadn’t known. He put his head under the pillow and wailed in his bed. Then fear gripped him, fear of the fact that, if they came looking for him, his embarrassment would come to light—that his mother had locked him in—and then he remembered what she said, that she would face off against them with the gun, and he began being dead scared for her.
“Mom!”
“What is it?”
“Let me out, I won’t go anywhere.”
“Shut up, asshole! Shut up and lie there!”
After a while, he shouted, “Mom!”
“What is it?”
“I’m hungry.”
Now I’ll get her, he thought. She can’t stand the idea of me being hungry.
But she didn’t answer.
After a while, he heard something at the door and she said, “I talked to Sobotka upstairs and explained everything to him. He’s tying a tray for you right now. A smart man, he comes up with everything. He took a drawer from a shelf and we’ll pass you the food on it from Sobotka’s apartment using ropes. We’ll have two drawers, he said, because he has to make you a tray for the chamber pot so we don’t put shit and food on the same tray. Hands of gold, that Sobotka.”
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