Rafo, the owner, worked alone and he squinted as he stood behind the bar, which was, I don’t know why, funny to us.
“Anyway, thanks, ladies, for thinking of us,” Branoš said, and brought us each a drink.
“Karma Chameleon” was playing at the bar, and it was kind of silly, like the old days. We must have looked funny when we started dancing.
Then Rafo treated us to a round of Angebot rakija, which is a strange name for a rakija, but it wasn’t bad. He took a shot himself, and said, “While eighties music is still playing at the Blue Lagoon, the factory will not fall!”
He can be funny, I thought, even though I can never tell if it is on purpose.
We toasted, and then once more. This time it was my round, and little by little we got pretty drunk, and hardly being able to describe how, I was making out with Branoš over there by the toilet. No one came across us, but I had the feeling everyone knew when we came back, which was a little embarrassing because I’m older, after all, than he is. He can hardly be right for me—but fine, I kept thinking while we continued drinking—it’s better I’m aware of this, better than if I’d rushed things. The museum will always be there, and it would be better, I thought, if I didn’t care about anything.
27
YOU NEED TO have nerves of steel and a huge dose of tolerance.
My little secretary left me high and dry. He was a piece of shit, but for some reason—I don’t know how—he really didn’t smell bad. I even liked the smell of his skin and his soul. Maybe I even kind of loved him, with his scent of half-rotten apples.
He was twisted just like this world, and still he did create some joy. There was something left in him, as if forgotten in the trunk, a respect for the truth, which he had thrown away but it was lodged in the trunk. And he didn’t lie to himself, and neither did I. Even if he tried, I didn’t let him on our little trip away from the world, this little trip that grew bigger, because he, it seemed, had spiced things up for me. At the last moment, with his last ounce of strength, like a German soccer player, you see, he made a last-minute child for me.
Of course, now there’s no word from him.
Luckily, he left me enough money to wait down there until the situation cooled. Luckily I’m not blond, so I didn’t stand out on the street, and I was sunning myself every day on the deck, so I tanned like a lamb on a spit. It was convenient for the two times I went down to the port, where I might have yelled too much in my poor English and threatened them with an international court and my American lawyers who were just waiting for my signal. Of course, I also threatened them with the involvement of our great country’s embassy, and then later on, when I looked it up online, realized that we didn’t even have an embassy there, but consular services were covered by our embassy in the next country over, where Oleg had gone. Well, what can you do? We didn’t have any of the other things I threatened them with, either, and I wonder what these frightened men thought of me. A couple of them—who were crammed in this one office, as if they were there to kill time between regimes—kept shrugging, saying the port still wasn’t functioning normally, our cargo had been unloaded at a very, very bad moment—very, very bad momentum, one of them kept repeating—after the heroic protester self-immolated. But I didn’t get whether this bad moment meant they had also burned the containers in the port, or if they had burned documents, or if they hadn’t even received documents, or if these men hadn’t even been there so as to avoid being immolated as customs officers of the regime. They just shrugged and, like me, wondered where that turbine might be. Unbelievable! What do you mean it’s not here? Well we don’t know, either, but we will check momentarily, and they tinkered on the computer. And that moment lasted and lasted. . . . They’ll find it sooner or later, they reassured me. So later I kept trying to call them, which gave me a crick in the neck, I don’t know why, I held the phone with my head. And shoulder.
For the rest of the time I worked on my tan. I had the time to talk to myself, I talked everything over with myself up in the penthouse, like a forgotten movie star decked out with sunglasses, lying on a sunbed, or like an orphan, depending on the day and my mood. Sometimes I almost died of loneliness, but then I would remember Ava Gardner reclining on a chaise lounge and say to myself—take this as compensation for all those years without a vacation. But I didn’t have a bikini, so I tanned in my underwear, until I realized how good it felt to be naked up there above the revolutionary city.
No one could see me, and it was exciting, both politically and physically, and more than once I wanted to go down and quickly bring up a young man burning with revolution. But who would get rid of him then, I thought, and kept basking until I’d get too hot, and then I’d take a long shower. At first, when I missed my period I didn’t even notice because the days were a jumble, they’d become nameless. When I finally realized it was missing, I thought this was from stress and fear, naked sunbathing and giddiness, from a time of carelessness, from forgetting who I was and where I was, and the strange feeling that sometimes emerged there under the sun: as if my body were atop the seething world.
One time I fell asleep like that on the deck with this feeling and had a strange dream—that I was bigger and much fatter than I am, and that I was lying naked atop a plain hill while the sounds of crickets chirped from all around, and everything shimmered in the heat, and in this dream I watched myself from above, wondering why my thighs and belly were so big, while the sounds of crickets turned into the sound of things shattering. Then I opened my eyes and saw a helicopter clattering above me, so I thought that they had been hovering like that and watching me for some time, although maybe they were just circling over the city and woke me up that instant. But I got scared so I ran back inside, imagining the look of the pilot who was surveying the situation in the city, then saw a naked woman and forgot about the situation.
I was afraid he’d remember the building and the apartment and one of these days ring the doorbell in a leather jacket and pants, holding flowers or a gun, saying, in French, that he loved me; or telling me in Arabic that I was a whore who was defying the sky and Allah. I imagined different scenarios, and I planned how to behave around the pilot, how to keep myself alive and well, and how to convince him to give me a lift with the helicopter to the place where the scheduled airlines departed. However, the pilot never did show, that day or the next, even though, in a way, I was still waiting for him, just as I was waiting for Oleg. But the pilot seemed more likely to show than Oleg, since I was watching CNN and saw that things were becoming seriously chaotic where he’d gone, which CNN reported anxiously but also with enthusiasm. It looked as if my little secretary had gone in the wrong direction, I thought, and my period was pretty late, and there was no sign of the pilot. I even started imagining Oleg returning in a flight suit, in a helicopter, and lowering the rope ladder and us leaving at the end of the movie, above this white city, over the sea, all the way to infinity and the final credits.
I was afraid for some time, but in a few days I was soaking up the sun on the deck again, and this time I was careful not to doze off and be surprised by something from the sky, although I was no longer sure if I would run back inside or keep lying like a sleeping beauty under the helicopter’s clatter when my pilot came, because I’d already begun feeling familiar about him.
And he did come. I heard him from a distance.
In case I wasn’t sure whether to run or stay, I kept a small white towel next to me, to cover my nakedness, and that’s what I did as soon as I heard it. He was circling up there, and I watched this flight of the bumblebee through my sunglasses, motionless, and he really did come closer and lower, until I saw him through the open side door of the helicopter waving and grinning, the cheery Arabian pilot, with shiny teeth, probably around thirty-five years old. I didn’t move, as if I were asleep behind the sunglasses, and while I was considering whether to wave, he was already on his way back up into the sky with a grin on his fac
e.
If I were allowed to behave like a man, I thought, that is, if I were allowed to behave any way I liked, I’d have waved back. But a woman can’t show what she wants because she doesn’t know if she’ll get beaten like a whore. I’m not free, though I’m freer than others: I don’t respond to what I want, but to threats. That’s realistic—I’ve discussed this with the savvy friend in my head.
And so the helicopter and my lover from the sky flew away.
So much for my fling with the pilot.
The next day, they announced the first flights out. I bought a ticket and went once again to the port. I took a cab there, and again, in my poor English, threatened with the international court and my American lawyers sick of waiting for an easy case, and with the involvement of the embassy of our great country, which had actually moved here, because the ambassador had fled the country where Oleg was. And since the ambassador had left to save his skin, I knew there was no chance of doing business with them anyway and Oleg was stuck down there, but I thought: I have to find the turbine and then we’ll sell it to someone else.
But the guys killing time in the office at the port between regimes had already grown bolder, it seemed to me, and they started feeling like the authority again, so I annoyed them with my bad English. I think they realized I was making empty threats—a skinny woman on the lookout for a turbine. They started asking where the turbine was supposed to go, why were there no buyers looking for it, and who was I anyway. They looked at me suspiciously, snickered at my yelling, looked me over in a way that left me scared I might disappear like the turbine. Maybe this was all in my mind, but I did start freaking out, so I pulled out my last card, the one that came first to mind, and told them in the most serious tone that I had connections with the Italian prime minister—I don’t know where I got the idea, I guess I thought they’d heard of his mistresses—and while leaning on the desk, I got in the lead guy’s face and said “Mafia!” I meant to say I was the Mafia, not them, although I saw they didn’t get it. But this confused them enough to keep them in their seats while I left the office with my head held high, vigorously slammed the door, stormed down the stairs, and strode out of the port. I didn’t run so I wouldn’t be stopped.
At the gate, the cabdriver was talking to men in another car. I got into the cab, looking over my shoulder, and they went on talking, which startled me—who the hell are these men?
Then I realized they were asking for directions and my driver was explaining things to them, but they weren’t following him. I yelled through the window, “Oh, c’mon! Go ask someone whose meter’s not running!”
I didn’t even say this in English. I guess they understood “meter.” I turned around to see if someone was following me, and then the cabdriver finally got in after a hasty tirade of words, threw the car into first gear, and said, “Excusez-moi.”
The next day off I flew.
This is the second time I’m meeting with Nikola. He rises to his feet when I walk into the office, where he has, obviously, been smoking a lot and is listening quietly to classical music on the secondhand record player I found for him before I left. The record is creaking, like everything else.
“I haven’t had any news from him, either,” he says, despondent.
I look at him, so I, too, feel sad, like in a love story, except our story’s no good.
For the story to have worked, we’d have had to be meant for each other, but Oleg figured from the start that we weren’t meant for each other.
I watched him conclude this right away, because I’m not one to be carried away by stories about love, except when I watch movies, which I really should be banned from doing. If I hadn’t watched Titanic, and if he hadn’t gotten to me by reminding me of it, I wouldn’t be pregnant now, thinking about no-good love stories.
This story is no good, and wasn’t any good, because I’m dirt poor, and he, you see, is not.
I thought about this over those days out on the deck. It’s all about the money: that’s why I’m still angry when I think of him and our lousy romance. I know, I’m not a person he’d take to the theater and to places where the acting is first-rate, but if I had money everything would have been different. He’d have taken me, and I’d have learned what to say in that sort of crowd. Then I’d have said something different, but what’s important is knowing what’s expected, so you can hold your own. Holding my own, I could have taken hold of the tiller. However, he didn’t count on me. We both knew this, and that was the best part. It was that kind of love.
Still, watching the news makes me sad, when I see those people on CNN yelling Allahu Akbar, then gunfire, then Allahu Akbar, gunfire, Allahu Akbar, and so on, with no comment, because they’re allies, and I find this alliance a strange one between Allah and Washington and Paris.
“When my old man died, I felt it,” said Nikola, his face crumpling, “That’s why I believe Oleg’s still alive.”
I wanted to hug him then, but I didn’t.
“C’mon, sit down,” I say. “I didn’t want to say this until I was sure . . .”
“Say what?” he said, sitting down.
“I’m pregnant.”
His tongue seemed suddenly shorter, and he looked for it in his mouth. “With Oleg?”
“No, with Hillary Clinton.”
He stared at me as if I’d dyed my hair, so I spelled it out. “Yes! With Oleg.”
He blotted the sweat from his forehead, and his eyes seemed to be gazing inward instead of out. I said, “I remember so clearly when he walked in that day and said, ‘We’re bringing in foreign capital.’ I knew right away that someone would be screwed over, but not that it would be me. Hats off, he invested in me. I’m thinking whether to keep the baby. There, I’ve said it.”
“Don’t get an abortion!” he sat up.
“So, you get to decide?” He pissed me off. “Are you going to be the one who looks after this baby?”
“I will look after it!” he said, without stopping to think.
“So you say.”
“Yes!”
“Really? But, look, the child won’t have a father. It’ll be a bastard.”
“But it’s Oleg’s, right?”
He seemed a little slow. I said, “It is. And you’re sure Oleg’s coming back? I’m sorry, but it’s hard for me to bet on that with this child. Who can confirm it’s his, if Oleg doesn’t return? Nobody! Or, do you have any ideas? I have to decide now.”
“I don’t understand. What ideas?”
“Well . . . If he doesn’t come back, you’ll declare yourself the father.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you just say you’d care for it? Did you not say, ‘Don’t get an abortion’? Don’t say what you don’t mean.”
“I did, but—”
“Well, sign on the dotted line, so you don’t forget. Otherwise, this child won’t have a father. And that’s not a good feeling. Get it? I can tell everyone it’s his, but nobody can confirm that. If he comes back, it’s his decision whether to accept the kid or not. But if he doesn’t, you’re it. What do you say?”
“Wait, is this you negotiating a deal?”
“Yes, in the name of my child. That’s what his dad did. And I want to have the baby in your country. Can you make that happen?”
He thought about this, then put a pill in his mouth. I guess the pill helped him think. He walked over to the record player, turned up the volume a notch, and then stared out the window. The music was weird. I couldn’t tell if it was happy or sad.
“I can make that happen. But this . . . I have to think about it . . .”
“I’ve thought about it, too. The child will stay with me, but . . . if anything happens to me . . . you’ll take it. And in that case it’s better to have everything on paper.”
He exhaled.
“Why shouldn’t it be yours, if you’ll be caring f
or it anyway?”
“But it’s not the same . . .”
“It’s not the same, it’s better. It’s better for the child to have a father. Later we can tell the kid we had irreconcilable differences. That much should be obvious, anyway.”
“You act as if you know Oleg’s not coming back?”
“If he could have, he’d have been back by now. But I don’t want to make predictions. I said if.”
He halted, as if to catch his breath, and we listened to the record player: a large orchestra on a creaky ship’s deck.
“Okay!” Nikola said. “If he doesn’t come back, I’ll be the father.”
Nikola’s eyes went red—in the blink of an eye he had a child.
I could cry, too, I thought, but I didn’t want to be sad. I got up and gave him a gentle pat. We both looked out the window toward the town where I was born—I didn’t want that for my child.
I changed the subject. “I gave you the card. Is there anything in it?”
“You think they’d pay for something they never received?”
“No, but still.”
“I’m going to Switzerland in a couple of days to see. The account can’t be checked from here.”
“Okay.”
“Lipša,” he said, “please keep quiet about where you’ve been, about everything, you know, otherwise, they’ll block us for good.”
“Don’t worry. But what about the turbine down there?”
“I sent them the documents I received from the shipping company. Oleg’s line: some high-class smugglers. They panicked there. Their story was “Sorry, everybody watches out for their ships.” But they did send some papers. We need to call and pester the people at the port. Can you do that?”
“Sure. I already have experience with them.”
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