“That’s because you have no reason to hate me.”
“And you do?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the boss.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“You’re paying.”
“That’s the only reason?”
“It’s not so simple.”
“How come?”
“Because you wouldn’t love me if I loved you. Because you’re the boss.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s where we differ.”
All these exchanges were made without eye contact. She way lying on her stomach, looking at the TV, and he was looking at the ceiling while President Ben Ali’s escape from the country was being retold on the news.
“Lipša,” he said, not moving. “You’re a fine piece of ass.”
“Is that a compliment?” she said, not moving.
“Yes.”
“Thanks, then.”
“It doesn’t sound so good if I say you’re a fine piece of dick.”
“No. Come up with something better.”
“You’re not bad.”
“Thanks.”
“Maybe you don’t have to go?”
“I have to go to the desert. There’s no other way.”
25
I FLEW ON the plane, which I’m not afraid of at all, because I’m only afraid of silly things, not things like flights—so we don’t crash, eh—I’m afraid of walking over land that’s crisscrossed by human fences where their stale souls have their seats, penned up in drawers they sometimes emerge from as enraged lions prancing, leaping toward the enemy, because the enemy releases them from airlessness, the enemy opens the way out into an open field, a field of revenge due to musty misery, a petty fear changed by the enemy into pleasure, so the enemy is drier than bread, he is like a father to them whom they kill in their dreams, screaming from the little fences they carry with them. When they introduce themselves, they describe nothing but the little fences. They always introduce themselves and because of this you cannot walk the land and always listen to them introducing themselves, greeting them all the time and constantly establishing and glorifying the little fences and fixing them with every greeting. You have to find measure, act in a measured manner, measured according to weight and leg-length, and moderate, psychologically and sexually, moderation is the worst because it retracts, and you have to walk like that on land. That’s what I’m afraid of, not planes, but greeting little fences and moderation. I’m afraid of the glorification of the misfire of everything, because then I don’t know where I am, and what’s the use of this labyrinth of words, shining and sparkling armor within which I tread like a burglar, going through the holes of the earth like a fugitive who hasn’t yet been found but who needs to be found, so they find him in me, the alleged me, even though I neglected the little fence, set it awry, left it like that because it was leaning anyway. This was a problem for me until I saw there is no problem, I’m not interested in the little fence. Then I received news of a house, a house that exists, and the house wants me to make it mine, it is calling me from within, it wants me to introduce myself and enter, almost like in a story I once read—my suffering countrymen told me the story is so nice, a children’s tale about a hedgehog’s home—in which a little home is glorified, certainly glorified.
And I flew over, I can’t say I wanted to, but I had to see it. The fine gentleman who read my letters greeted me and I could tell he was a little uncomfortable what with knowing me too well yet not at all. Through the dark we reached his little house, entered the garden through a little fence. . . . The sound of a swinging bat could be heard, then a hard smash, and shadows disappeared, quick and rustling.
Two of them disappeared, I think, I couldn’t see them clearly.
This man, I could see, had enemies, and they attacked him just as I came. Am I to blame? It can’t have anything to do with me, I think, while I hear my shriek, still in the air ever since that blow.
“They’ve killed him!” I scream.
The door to his house opens and someone appears in the light of the doorway. A man in a sad trench coat, only without the coat, staring into the garden. It is Pops, an old apparition walking through my shriek, he walks up to his friend covered in blood. We look at his eyes and at his eyebrows covered in blood, his eyes appear to apologize for summoning me, for claiming that things are different now.
Father jumps around him flapping his elbows like a scrawny bird that can’t fly, and then he props the man under his neck and lifts his head, and I tell him clearly, I can unexpectedly hear myself saying: “Lay him on his side.”
At this point, shadows start coming in, their horrific faces appearing, questioning and exclamatory, because they heard a scream they say, pull out their phones and call—ambulance, ambulance—and I am standing there a stranger, and my father crying like a child. Me looking down at him, standing next to him, standing on the same spot for a long, long time, looking at my hands that appear to be typing midair, as if typing a letter on a ghastly keyboard, shocked as always, a shock that has been going on for years and has had its ups and downs, and this is, indeed, one of the ups, in that yard, close to the house that does and doesn’t exist, mid-return, in a front yard where I spend time studying a creature made of metal with headlights instead of eyes, a sculpture of sorts, and I silently understand it.
The ambulance sounds like an alarm from a pillaged house, nothing unusual, it sounds like this all the time in the body, it sounds as soon as it is woken, this is what’s hidden inside me, I thought, an alarm ringing and nobody turns it off.
The ambulance parks, the door opens, the belly, and people in white approach, walking, weary of compassion, not at all surprised at how life is so painful, they—I know them—have perfected their gait by everyday walks to this painful place. I know them. I’ve fucked them. Only one of them, admittedly, one, who needed to fuck in the neighborhood of death, that’s what he said. In a body that might scatter at any time, or so he’d say. His eyes were full of sexual fear, as if there were no tomorrow, eyes fighting for life. We fucked multiple times, in the restroom and in other white rooms, everything over there was as white as a restroom. They thought they could fool somebody with the whiteness, because it would be so painfully clear if they had red lab coats. If they had red walls, it would have been hellish, as, in fact, it was. That was where we fucked, in a whitewashed hell, it was always hot there, warmly frightening, and I fucked him in the restroom and other white rooms, while he was always saying we were out of time.
They dragged Sobotka into the belly of the vehicle, switched on all their equipment, and disappeared with a weoo-weoo, while the father, still crouching, was now holding onto my calf, tears streaming. I patted him on the head and he yelped down there like a lost dog, or, I look, is this the black dog yelping I hadn’t noticed before, or both? Then I took him under my arm and stood him up—he was smaller than me, smaller than my famous slimness—what a surprise, I’d always thought he was taller. He hugged me around the waist and sobbed on my bosom as if I were his mother; he wasn’t acting the father, a relief. He was a son, I thought, somebody’s son who couldn’t be a father after he’d failed once, he deleted that function, mounted a plaster cast over the fracture, never to be removed. And I, I thought, might have wanted to be the son, to take the place of the dead brother from the stories, not embracing the life of a woman, not looking to get anything from this, but scattering it as if it were someone else’s.
And the neighboring faces near us, questioning and exclamatory, I see they don’t know what they want, they want to go and not go, and they start to move and not move, they look at us and ask who the attackers were, they asked me suspiciously who I am, who do you belong to? One of them asks me like that—Whose are you?—so I say, I’m Slavko’s daughter, and there is a murmur of great surprise, and the wom
an who asked told me she’d seen, she’d recognized me, her sister used to babysit me and I’d played over there, she was glad she’d recognized me so easily, and everything was flickering, everything was full of the sweat of the fear we’d released into the air in that place, the stench of a vengeful desire quickly worm-eaten, the bitter spit and epileptic clarity when I said—Let’s go to my house!—as if it were obvious they’d follow me, and this was obvious, because they would have followed me even if I hadn’t invited them along, just so they could see it all, my return from oblivion, the searching for the house. So they walked with me down the road, and I knew the way, there was no need to ask where we were, but, like a cat returning from far away, I walked in the dark. A car approached, its siren wailing, it was the police, late. They rolled down their windows, they came to investigate, says one of them tired or tipsy, and someone tells them there—that’s Sobotka’s house, where Slavko is standing on the road with the dog—and off they go, tires screeching. We walk on, walk in murmur, and, walking like that, it doesn’t take long. We arrive at the street, and then at the darkness of the house asleep, and once we’ve arrived I yell and yell from the road, and yelling I laugh at everything—This is the house that exists!—and the crowd behind me gasps as if their blood is running cold.
Someone has turned on the lights in the house.
I stand on the road and look at that light in the room where Mother and Father slept, not my father-wreck, but Mother and Father, in the room that was the least mine in the house, where they’d hidden, and there’s a light there now, and someone behind me shouts, “Have you no shame?”
“Have you no shame?” shouts someone else. Then the light goes out. A tumult of shouting breaks out, many shouts, human, suddenly becoming angry as if the anger inside them has been released, so they shout all sorts of things. There were a couple of younger people who were probably on their way to a soccer game, so they started chanting—Shitheads! Shitheads! Shitheads! I might have found this funny had it not been going on ever since I’d arrived, all the dizzy coalescing that made me want to sob with rage, because the man was smacked with a metal bat and I came here in a fury-blaze, like a ricocheting billiard ball, with my old rage to boot, with the guttural crowd beside me, so enraged, I cry and fling wide my arms as if I am banishing the evil spirits from the house and the crowd, evil clowns, and my rage is heard, and the other noises go still, only the rage is heard coming from my throat. Like a cat I walk toward the house, hop over the little fence, go to the door, and start banging. We bang on the door and the shutters, and even more people than before seem to be here, and we bang on every aperture, and then from the floor above us a voice is heard, but there’s no one in sight, and a voice shouts: I’ll shoot!
And a germ of silence forms.
Then I go out onto the clearing. I shout. I hear myself shouting “Shoot!” as if I want the house to kill me.
26
“I AM ANGRY, I’m so angry there are no words to describe it,” I told Erol in the Blue Lagoon. He was gazing somewhere past me.
The bar was empty. Other people have no money, and I’m spending Afghani savings.
“I will not let this slide,” I said. “Those were Ragan’s men, couldn’t be anyone else.”
Erol looked at me as if he had only now started paying attention.
“You’re sure? What about the seven billion others—”
“So you’re defending him?”
“You have to be certain about these things.”
“It has to be them. This cannot stand!”
“No offense,” he said, “don’t think you’re going to take care of it, because you won’t. Other things are in store for you.”
Erol seemed strange. As soon as they heard about the attack on Sobotka there were people who wanted to go to where Ragan lived, armed, but he talked them down. So did Nikola. Admittedly, who knows what would have happened, but still.
“Sobotka would’ve told you the same thing. You can take his place.”
“It makes me angry, too. Nikola won’t explain anything, not where Oleg is, nor why there’s no money. He’s closed himself off. They say we did things differently, the newspapers rant on about self-management. . . . It’s nothing. As soon as money is involved we’re in the dark.”
“I asked him the same thing. He told me he can’t say anything. Maybe he doesn’t know. He looks clueless.”
“He always looks that way.”
“Yeah. But I think he’s sincere.”
“Sincere or not, if we continue working without money, that means they owe us for our work. And we don’t know if we’ll ever get it back. Why grant them credit? It’s not ours to grant. This would only make sense if we’re all co-owners, and that’s what I told him today.”
“That’s why we need you. What did he say?”
“He shrugged and said, ‘Come up with a plan. I’m for it.’ So I told him, ‘I will. But what will Oleg say?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Maybe nothing.’ He sounded comatose, like Sobotka.”
• • •
I know, I’m stupid, that is, I don’t know how to behave, around men, I mean. Nikola was scared of me, I guess he thought I wasn’t all there, because when I start falling for someone, I can’t stop. Men tend to gasp for breath around me. I can see them struggling for breath and their eyes wander, because I skip something, a phase. I don’t know, I generally don’t know how to stop once I start, and then because of that, I’m stuck more or less all the time and hold back, like someone on a chain, and I have to tie myself down or I’ll break off and end up all over the place. This is my problem, I know, I have no boundaries, although you can’t tell this at first, because everything around me and on me is so shipshape and tidy. My museum is also totally in order, clear, organized, everything spotless, like at my house, and there is order everywhere, but then when someone like him shows up, where you can tell he needs me, he needs order, then hope arises and I lose control and can’t stop. I see myself plunging in, everything goes too fast, and I make a muddle. The order all turns into mess and everything goes to hell, because as soon as you destabilize me, I don’t know how to take things slowly. I mean, easy and cool, so he doesn’t realize how important he is, or feel pressured. And things are like that every time, every time over the last million years since I rush and stop only when I see I’ve gotten myself nowhere, into my own story, I didn’t ask anyone, no one knows where I’m going. I just keep going on my way in my head, and I hate myself for it, really. I’m missing a few marbles, and I keep waiting for someone to fill in the gaps. I wasn’t angry at all when I saw he was looking at me like I was missing a few marbles, but I thought—Go ahead, do something, fix it, you’re the master, you’re the man for me. Well, I really am an idiot, because he’s looking at me like I have a few marbles missing, and I say yes, to myself, because you can’t say that out loud, although it would be, as they say, cool, maybe fun and easy. But I don’t say it out loud and he has no idea what I’m thinking. But I need someone, someone to fix me, and it’s all wrong, I know it is, and I shouldn’t be thinking like this at all. I’m better than that, because I’m smart, even though I may act stupid, which keeps happening, and it takes me by surprise each time, because I freeze in situations—after every hope and after I realize I’ve been rushing, I freeze for a time, a long time. I guess until I forget. And I’m gone, I don’t go out, and again I’m always surprised that I’m like this and I keep rushing like someone who doesn’t know how to drive. Then I see everything all at once and feel angry at myself. I need someone, that’s what I thought, someone like Nikola, someone who’s polite and pretends he doesn’t see. I saw he has the emotional room for my confusion. I need to be handled slowly, I don’t need short-tempered idiots. When it comes to macho types, I’m in charge, I can put them in their place, there’s no doubt that I’m stronger than they are, because I have them in plain view, but I’m not interested, absolutely not inter
ested—if I were even a little interested, I’d have been saved—but I need someone who understands, who will fix me, so parts of me and him fit together like puzzle pieces, and this man seemed like one, but I screwed this up because I couldn’t stop, and then he hooked up with the woman named Šeila. I’m explaining this to show how generous I am, and above all that—I know everything’s ruined, I’m no maniac—I just want to help somehow, because I see they’re in trouble. They don’t come to the Blue Lagoon as often anymore, there’s no money for rounds, you can tell. But I didn’t want to ask Nikola. I get it—we’re down to a quick greeting—but I ran into Erol and Branoš that Friday in the empty Blue Lagoon and asked Branoš, because I see he’s like the new Sobotka around here, but he didn’t say anything specific, so I introduced my friend from the town hall, Jaka, who was with me. I suggested maybe she could help out.
I told them how she stepped forward to handle the paperwork for Slavko’s house, and Jaka nodded. She’s modest, so she said it wasn’t difficult, because the guys at town hall were scared of trouble when his daughter showed up, when Sobotka was attacked, because they thought this might lead to something more, to even more trouble. They can hardly wait to be done with it, they’re scared of Slavko’s daughter, though she’s not doing anything.
Branoš asked Jaka what they could do, what she could do to help them, and she said she’d check some documents; the factory’s vacation resort on the coast was lost when the former country was broken up into several smaller ones, so they could possibly ask the country that took it over for compensation, they could initiate a legal process. She also said there are government funds for underdeveloped municipalities, and there is also a chance they could get money from abroad; they could apply for funding to modernize the factory, but that needed to be carefully prepared, because the funding is limited and there are many applicants. “This all sounds pretty long-term,” said Branoš, and she nodded. “Long-term” didn’t look so promising to him, but, he said, he’d pass this along, good to know these things, but the situation was looking hazy in the short term. Eventually, I guess to lighten the mood, he added more loudly, “And I’m also a bit worried about the Blue Lagoon!”
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