He listened to her, stunned before shouting desperately, “Tell him not to breathe a word of this to anybody! They’ll rib me in town forever!”
“I’ll tell him,” she said. “But if you shout and bang, you’ll tell ’em yourself! And I could spread it around town myself if you drive me up the wall!”
“Mom!” he shouted the next day around lunchtime, after the food delivery was already becoming routine.
“What is it?”
“Tell Sobotka to send some sports news, or a newspaper, for me to read, will you? I’ll go crazy like this.”
“There are no newspapers, son. Where have you been? They don’t sell them anymore.”
Right. He’d completely forgotten. He’d thought everything would be the same as it used to be now that he was back home.
“Tell him then to send me a book.”
“Oh? A book?” she laughed. “Well, I’ll be damned. . . . Should’ve locked you up sooner!”
Sobotka didn’t have many to choose from. Two books were inscribed, meaning he had received them from the factory as prizes for his years of service. The third he must have bought, himself, since there was no inscription and the cover only said Hamlet. The first two were the novel On the Edge of Reason by a Croatian author, Miroslav Krleža, and a book by Engels, Marx’s thinner-bearded companion.
“Oh, man, don’t you have anything better?” Erol asked Sobotka through the window early in the morning, because he’d insisted that deliveries be done at dawn, so nobody would see.
“Nope! I only have books on engineering and sculpture.”
“Engineering and . . . what?”
“Sculpture!”
“Aw, come on!”
Hamlet was the shortest one, so that’s what he read first. He read it twice in three days, and it made him restless, so he took a break from reading and had nightmares in which everyone killed each other, like at the end of Hamlet. His dreams took place in Ragan’s hotel—Erol was shooting everywhere, and everyone ended up dead, including him. As a disembodied spirit he could still see his mother, carrying his light, soulless body to a distant grave, where she laid him to rest next to the girl who was raped, whose name was Ophelia in his dream.
Then, just to move on, he started reading On the Edge of Reason. He read it over a few days and had no idea an author could write such a book, let alone the man in the picture, who looked like such a complete bore.
After pessimistically staring at the book cover, he eventually started reading Engels as well. Engels was a mystery to him—everyone knew Marx was the man in charge, but nobody knew who Engels was or how he came to be on the bulletin board at Erol’s school. He seemed like someone who’d shown up to a party uninvited, yet he’d always been there.
Erol thought he wouldn’t understand a thing, but his own cleverness surprised him. He would have liked to look up some of the words but, all in all, the book was as readable as a newspaper, albeit an old one. In fact these were, indeed, newspaper articles describing events of one hundred and fifty years ago from old American newspapers, which surprised him—the fact that Engels had written for American papers. How was that possible? Those must have been some other Americans.
Once he’d read that one as well, it was clear he had to do something, so he stood by the door and tried to persuade his mother to let him out.
“Come on, let me out, I’m not going back there, no way, this Engels guy explained it all.”
“Liar!” she yelled.
“May I drop dead if I’m lying!”
“You’ve read it, my ass! Not the Englishman.”
“I have so read it!”
“How do you know English?”
“It’s not in English. Engels is his name. It’s in our language!”
“An Englishman writing in our language? Yeah right!”
“He’s not English.”
“Then what is he?”
“He’s German. I didn’t know that, either.”
“The Englishman is German? Then what’s Marx? A Kraut, too?” she said, laughing at him from the hallway.
“I don’t know about him, but you can let me out. I’m not going anywhere!”
She didn’t believe him. Luckily, the war was getting complicated, so Ragan’s boys no longer had the time to come to N. to look for him. He warned his mother that they should return the Kalashnikov to Ragan’s crew so it wouldn’t look as if he’d stolen it, and she claimed that had all been taken care of, Sobotka had sent it to them.
Later, he found out that Ragan and his unit had moved to a different region altogether, where—Sobotka informed him from the window—a new conflict had erupted.
“They probably went to stir things up,” said Sobotka.
“Ragan’s not such a bad guy,” Erol said, feeling obligated to defend him in front of others, if only to justify his own actions.
“Come now,” Sobotka shot back. “Luckily, you were with them when they weren’t doing anything serious here.”
Erol had plenty of time to think while in his mother’s makeshift prison. He knew he wouldn’t have restrained himself had he stayed with them. Eventually, he would have mustered the courage to prove he was not a mama’s boy, that he had the guts to do the nastiest things. But somehow he knew that wasn’t who he was. The same thing could happen to anyone caught up by a wave during which he couldn’t turn around and save the girl he found pretty, the girl who became prettier every day in his memory, and he thought that in a strange way he’d fallen in love.
Later he thought that he wasn’t so afraid of death—because if he’d needed to go behind enemy lines, that would be easier—but he felt it impossible to turn against the people he ate, drank, and slept in the same room with. That’s why the desire to save her manifested itself as weakness, trembling, like clenching his jaw, a fuzzy headache and throbbing in his temples, like fear at his own thoughts, so he said, “Gotta go out!” and he walked through the ditches there, and smoked, Hamlet-like.
Many more things could have befallen him had his mother not rescued him.
Yes, he thought, all of that could have happened to anyone who had no one to protect them from evil.
This was the worst thing he learned in the war.
Years later, he thought of this often, and he explained it to himself in his own particular way: as a fight for his soul between God and the Devil. When he drank, he’d explain what he called his fate to anyone willing to listen.
“You see, God loved me, but the Devil loved me, too. I loved God, but I also loved the Devil. I loved God more, but the Devil impressed me. Besides, the Devil was stronger. God was weaker. I loved him more, but I didn’t appreciate him. I didn’t appreciate him, and I suffered for it, and I’m suffering for it now, because my soul is heavy. It’s not light. Because this is not about who you love, but . . . Do you appreciate the good one or the evil one more? That’s what I’m asking. Do you appreciate a good man more than one who squashes a good man like an ant? Who do you appreciate more? God is weaker, I’m telling you. If God were stronger, it would be easy to be good. Right. It would be easy to be on the right side, but I’m telling you, this is not easy.”
A couple of Ragan’s boys turned up after his mother had already let him out of the room. They found him in town and told him Ragan had said he was never to talk about them. They told him he was lucky.
“Ragan let you go, and you should be grateful,” one of them said, his name was Kardan. Then he added, “I wouldn’t have let you walk like that. But there you have it.”
When he was eighteen, he was drafted, but Sobotka had already arranged for Erol to join the engineering-technical platoon. Sobotka took care of him, and under his wing, Erol lived to see the end of the war. They were in plenty of combat, but even there they were mostly fixing things—because electricity was essential even during the war. He learned a lot, even tho
ugh that would never make up for his lack of schooling. He was thinking about this today when he came out of the factory, smoking and looking at the distant mountaintops, where the snow still gleamed and reflected the sunlight.
Just then he noticed a man with a dog standing by the factory gate. He’d seen the nutcase around town, and now the man was trying enter the factory grounds. The watchman had stopped him and was saying something to him.
Erol went over to them, and just as he reached them and opened his mouth to shoo away the man with the dog, the man suddenly made a run for it, weaving around him, heading for the main building. The dog ran with him.
“What’s going on?” Erol asked the watchman. “Did you let him in?”
“No!”
Erol chased after the man and the dog.
By the time the man with the dog entered the building, Erol had caught up and grabbed the man by the scruff of the neck with his huge hand, holding him like prey, while the dog growled and sunk his teeth into Erol’s work boot.
“Let him go!” thundered Sobotka’s voice from across the hall.
Erol let go and the man shot him a sideways look, full of melancholy disapproval, as if Erol were an annoying fly.
Sobotka ran over and shouted joyfully, surprising Erol, “This is Slavko! He used to work with us.”
Erol had let go, but the dog still hadn’t released Erol’s heavy boot, so he considered his options—clearly he shouldn’t kick the dog. He heard Sobotka shout, “And he will again if he wants to.”
Nikola saw everything just as he was entering the building from the other side where the offices were, and he didn’t like what he was hearing.
The nutcase is going to work in the factory? Isn’t Sobotka going a little far?
Nikola waited for everyone to quiet down and then said, calmly but loudly, “I don’t think that depends solely on him.”
Nikola soon realized this was the wrong place for a discussion, and he and Sobotka should have dealt with this alone, in private. As it was, things took a different turn. Sobotka’s reaction must have been due to feelings he had from the past, or because Erol had been holding the guy by the neck like a sparrow.
At any rate, Sobotka yelled at Nikola, “Fine! It’s not just up to him, we’ll all take a vote!”
Sensing the situation turning confrontational, Nikola went over to Sobotka and said, “Wait!”
But Sobotka went on so everybody could hear him. Sounding a little bitter he declared, “When we started this thing, you told us we could do things our way. This man was one of the best engineers we had. Actually, he was the best. I’m saying this even though he was my rival. We should give him a chance. Where’s the problem, why not put it to a vote?”
Nikola felt his whole bloodstream vibrating. He had to think fast. What was the problem? Sobotka had been the one in charge of hiring people from the beginning. So what was it then? The problem is that my authority is slipping, that he didn’t ask me, that Oleg is the owner, that he and I didn’t think about the consequences of our promises, and I overreacted instead of working this out with Sobotka, that’s the problem. Nikola caught Branoš’s fixed gaze, and thought this was not a gaze of support. If he now confronted Sobotka and the workers, he’d gain nothing. He had to extricate himself from this without appearing to be backing out.
Nikola stood next to Sobotka and turned to the hall, saying, “You may stop working for a moment.”
Everyone was already looking at them anyway.
“It’s true, that’s what we said when we started this, and that is how it’s going to be. We won’t enforce anything. That’s why I said it’s not up to one person. Everyone needs to have a say. But we haven’t created procedures,” Nikola said, facing Sobotka. “Tell me, what exactly do you propose?”
After a short pause, Sobotka said, “I never worried about that, either . . . Everything was spontaneous, and maybe we should have decided on procedure. But I’m proposing we take a vote. And if there’s a tie, we’ll ask the watchman’s opinion.
At this point, Slavko giggled.
Sobotka and Nikola looked at him, and he said, “The dog has no boss!”
He laughed more.
“Okay, we need to know if this man wants to work,” Nikola said, “and then we have to check to see if he can work, if he’s capable.”
“I want to,” said the man with the dog.
Sobotka realized this was the first sane thing he’d heard from Slavko in many years, and looking at him, he noticed that Slavko had shaved his beard. There were small cuts all over his face, which didn’t leave the best impression, but still: he spoke, he shaved, he came.
Nikola said, “I think it would be good to vote on whether to take him for a one-month trial period, and then make a final decision. But first, let’s listen to why Sobotka supports him.”
Sobotka knew he ought to introduce Slavko, so he told them Slavko’s story, focusing on his work at the factory and his competence. He emphasized the award he’d received from the town of N. in 1984, but he didn’t mention the death of his son, to avoid upsetting the man. Instead, he said that Slavko had “suffered hard blows during the war and it had taken him a long time to recover.”
Slavko knew his turn was now. Frowning and looking up, he started talking in a rusty voice. “I want to work . . . I have walked the dog for a long time . . .” Somebody laughed at this, but Slavko went on. “I had nothing to do. . . . There was nothing there . . . just emptiness and numbers. . . . Then I saw you were working. . . . I know the factory and the machines. . . . I know all of it, it’s all familiar to me.”
Nikola was listening and thinking, What will Oleg say when I tell him we’re hiring raving lunatics?
The workers voted: most of them seemed to be in favor of hiring Slavko. Nikola had meant to abstain, but then he raised his hand, too—let the man work.
In the end, Erol wanted to add something, so he raised his hand slowly and said, “Can someone get the mutt off my boot?”
14
OLEG’S MOBILE WAS ringing out in the hallway, somewhere among his clothes.
He stepped out of the bathroom naked after a long shower, which was supposed to wash away his hangover. He shook his head as if trying to stretch a stiff tendon in his neck; his hair was still wet, and one eye was very red, probably from the shampoo. He stood in front of the mirror in the hall and picked up the phone, which had, meantime, stopped ringing. He returned the call while studying himself in the mirror. I’m so hideous, look how my fucking gut has swelled. Why did I drink so much last night? He’d had a meeting with an emissary of the Colonel and told the man that everything was going according to plan. The dinner had been great. And there had been no way around all the drinking. He felt as if he were going to burst into flames on the inside if he didn’t drink, if he didn’t quench it with alcohol. He tried to do his liver a favor by mostly sticking to beer. Wine only with meals and hard liquor only sometimes. Beer is for marathon runners, someone once told him. His apartment was full of bottles. That morning he thought he ought to start taking care of himself. This was a big game and was stressed and afraid, which he hadn’t acknowledged.
When Nikola said a journalist had stopped by, Oleg asked, “A local one?”
“No. He traveled here.”
“Wait a minute . . .”
He put on a bathrobe, went to the living room, and through the window watched a barge float lazily along a Viennese Danubian canal.
“Damned babbling,” he muttered.
“The watchman put him on the phone,” Nikola continued. “Apparently the guy had heard that the factory was being renovated and he’s interested. He wants to talk with me and the workers. Writing a small article, he says.”
“Even if it’s just publicity, media attention is a potential problem. It could lead to further digging.”
“So I shouldn’t let him in?�
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Oleg immediately knew this was happening because of the dinner party. So there, he had created the problem, not Nikola, as he had feared. He’d allowed himself a few minutes of the utmost bourgeois irony, and yes, as soon as Lorena mentioned the factory in front of the newspaper editor, he knew the genie was out of the bottle. Damned parties! The fact that a factory was being renovated was already bizarre, but one in which the workers weren’t bullied was highly unusual news, and this didn’t escape the attention of the post-socialist editor.
Dammit, Oleg thought, when he started this thing he didn’t count on all the historical aspects, and when he realized his mistake that night he moved to befriend the editor; he started talking to him about wines, hinted they could take a road trip to the Gorizia Hills, those sunny Slovenian slopes where you could see the lights of Udine at night, where a friend of Oleg’s lived, a famous winemaker whose pinot gris was quite something. After hearing this, the editor was all ears, and they started an almost poetic conversation about wines. Oleg was on his own turf here, because he’d been sipping wine for two decades, over dinners with people he didn’t know and who didn’t know him, with people who didn’t need to know him better, or he them, and wine was always a safe topic of conversation, certainly better than the weather, as there was always somebody to bring up aching joints, while when talking about wines the tongue savored its own enjoyment. You can’t have an anxious conversation about wine, and there is no better small talk at critical moments, and, generally, in times of crisis. Talking with the editor about wines, Oleg was sending him clear signals that they were both members of the same class, they were equally refined snobs. He was trying to tell him that he, Oleg, was not some equality ideologue, because a man who knows this much about fine wines has to believe in hierarchy. He’d thought the conversation was going fine, and there was that really first-rate cocaine—about which, although Oleg did know a lot, one couldn’t properly converse, because the poor cocaine producers, unlike winemakers, couldn’t have clearly marked labels, so Oleg had another small monologue that evening. “If they only had a simple label, we could differentiate among the many different kinds of coke, but as long as it’s like this, everything stays hazy . . . Just, like, hazy . . . Imagine if the wine label didn’t say whether the wine was excellent or superior, or who made it, or anything. No reviews, no magazines, everything hazy . . . There’s no way to determine true quality, and basically, the market cannot function properly. . . . Because the state is standing in the way, and if the state stepped aside, man, you would know who produced what, and you wouldn’t have to think every time about whether you’re getting value for your money. As it is, we’re groping in the dark, but I’ve developed a vocabulary of my own, so for this coke, I would say it has a particularly strong but supple body. . . . We have the aroma and tang of berries and mint . . . mixing with a strong accent of bitter chocolate and traces of coffee. . . .” He paused for laughter. “The texture is especially fascinating: it’s smooth, luxuriously rich, quietly glazing the cartilage of the septum and melting on the gums. . . . The aftertaste is tropical, bitter, and long. . . . And you see, if the state weren’t meddling in the market, I’d be sitting on juries as a connoisseur, attending festivals called ‘Poetry and Coke’—actually no, ‘The Stock Market and Coke,’ where we would confer international awards, medals for quality, and such, and there I would also offer my marketing services. This one I would dub Paloma Blanca and charge a fee for the name, so I earn something, too. But as things now stand, dammit . . .”
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