No-Signal Area

by Robert Perisic

  • • •

  That somebody was shooting strangers on the street, this he could not fathom. He was prepared to walk toward those people with open arms, thinking it impossible for someone to fire on a man walking like that, and he walked like that once.

  Zlata went mad, telling him: No! Don’t go!

  But after he saw the people on TV walking like that in the capital city, he got into his car and drove there. At the city limits he was stopped by people with eye slits, faceless, a declaration of a new brand of people. They could have killed him then, he later realized—Zlata was right and he was wrong, because he was still the same old man.

  They could have shortened him by a head, but that mustn’t have been easy for them, either, a few words could still get to those faceless eyes, when they asked him what he was, and it was already obvious they were referring to his faith and ethnicity. He said, “I’m a workingman, unemployed, a former strike leader. Nothing more.”

  After observing him silently, the eyes asked him, “Who were you on strike against?”

  “I was on strike for the workingman.”

  The eyes watched him from their slits like the eyes of a lizard. Maybe he, too, was a workingman, so he gestured, let Sobotka through. He must have been a workingman, thought Sobotka, but by the next day he could no longer speak to him that way—by the next day all of that had been erased.

  Sobotka came to that city—already under siege and in the snipers’ crosshairs—but they were still old people, gullible people from the peculiar system, and stubborn in their naivete, so they walked through the city, sometimes holding hands and singing good-natured, naive songs, trusting a peace that was already gone, but they refused to believe this, so strong was their belief in something else, because it was not only belief. Those people were different from people of today, and they couldn’t be convinced of anything, they couldn’t be swayed other than by force, iron and bullet, they could not be swayed except by being killed.

  Sobotka walked through the city beside them. The squares and streets were full of them, thousands were walking here and there, and not knowing where, they finally convened at and entered the Assembly of the Republic, and not knowing what to do, demanded the government’s resignation, and a few hours later the head of the government indeed tendered his resignation. This went so smoothly that Sobotka realized the government didn’t matter, this was a faceless thing, and he went out among the people again, just so he could walk with them and be there to the end.

  Sobotka walked through this wondrous city, among these people who were walking like Jesus, in this tragedy that seemed beautiful for a moment, in a city most luminous in the moments before its death.

  While they were walking across a bridge, a young woman next to him fell. And another. Picked off by a sniper. This could not be explained to them any other way. The start of a new era.

  Sobotka saw all this once more, in his nightmare during the coma, and then he felt he, too, had been hit.

  32

  THIS WAS ALL because Sobotka was lying there neither dead nor alive. Only Slavko came and talked to him. I stood out in front of the room for days, as if I were watching over him, because it was easier for me to stand outside the room than inside, and I heard Slavko talk. If Sobotka can hear anything, he will wake up, crazed by all the talk, I thought. I was thinking about sending Slavko away, but then I remembered how I’d tried to send him away from the factory, and Sobotka blew up, so I told myself to let him be, if he can hear, maybe he’s even amused. The rest of us are just standing there silent and waiting anyway.

  I waited and picked through my thoughts as I watched over him. I picked through all of them and concluded that I was hooked, that I wasn’t free, that I hadn’t been free for a long time, but now it was obvious.

  I was trying to reassure people like Branoš, because they didn’t know what they were talking about.

  But the acid started eating away at my throat while I stood guard there and listened to Slavko’s words through the door. I was burning up inside, so they gave me pills and told me what I shouldn’t eat, and I said to the doctor, “There are things I need to find out and do what has to be done, and then I’ll be able to eat what I want.”

  “What things?” he asked.

  “It’ll be like an operation for me,” I said.

  “You’ll operate on yourself?” the doctor asked me.

  “Doctors can’t help with this.”

  “Really?” He looked at me. “Is this all in your mind?”

  “Yes, in my mind, my psyche. But also in my physique.”

  “So what’s wrong?” he asked.

  I wanted to tell him I have to get into some other kind of trouble to rid myself of this, though again I wouldn’t be free. But it was best just to take the prescriptions and leave.

  And then today, Slavko came out into the hallway and said, “Flat.”

  “Flat?”

  “It’s flat,” said Slavko.

  I didn’t want to understand, so I said, “What are you jabbering about?”

  He was holding his head like he was scared of me, he started scratching his head like he wanted to scrub it, or to avoid my gaze.

  I grabbed his arm and he stopped.

  He looked at me and said, “He’s dead. Sobotka.”

  I walked in and looked at the monitor—the line was flat.

  When I hollered, and my throat stung like I was spewing lava, the nurses came running and then the doctors and they tried something there, I wasn’t even looking, I could only see Sobotka’s face.

  I looked at him for a while, in my unrest. Sobotka’s face was peaceful, his eyes closed, without the spasm of surprise I’d seen on the faces of the dead.

  I remembered his face looking down at me from above, when he passed me food and books from the upper floor. So I look up and wonder: Is there anything there?

  Then I crouched, with my head in my fists, then kneeled as if praying, and the nurses looked at me with pity, thinking I was his son.

  Slavko was there again, beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “They killed him,” I said.

  “Because he existed,” said Slavko. He patted me on the shoulder.

  Then Slavko seemed saner than me, maybe because we were there, at dead Sobotka’s side, and Slavko seemed to understand everything there was to understand, while I knew so few things. I asked him, “Will you tell his family?”

  He hesitated a bit then said, “Nedra will.”

  “I have to go,” I said.

  Slavko nodded.

  I looked at Sobotka again. I never told him how much he meant to me, and for that reason I didn’t think he was going to die, that he couldn’t leave what with all the words I’d left unsaid.

  “Sobotka,” I said, “thank you, dear friend. I’ll be on my way.”

  Then I left for home to pack, and prepare.

  33

  I SAW IT on the Internet.

  At first there were the headlines, then came the video.

  Did they cut off the man’s ear? It was him, bloody on one side of his head. He was under the mob—the phone used to record it was shaking—then he was on his feet again, surrounded by shrieking cries of Allahu Akbar, as if the shouter were overexcited and in a hurry. Did they cut off his ear? I couldn’t get a good look. I don’t know why I was staring only at that.

  I was afraid Oleg would show up somewhere in the video, with one side of his head bloody.

  He was dead soon afterward. The Colonel.

  The headlines on news sites flickered with excitement.

  A not-well-hidden euphoria, an odd kind of happiness, like the one when they started bombing Baghdad. When a meal is long in the making, everybody is happy once it’s finally done.

  I sat there for a while as if I’d survived a car crash and afterward I was sitting b
y the side of the road. You were on your way to somewhere, and now you’re sitting by the side of the road and you’re supposed to be happy to be alive.

  But the journey is done.

  I tried.

  There was no money in Switzerland.

  Hanka and I went through all the dusty papers, which included the ones in her attic, and shouted “Yes! They’re here!” when we found the contracts from 1980 to 1985. So I began calling old clients—the few who had survived—and in those international, sometimes even intercontinental, telephone calls they spoke to me as if I were calling from some extremely disrupted time zone.

  “Turbine 83-N?”

  “Yes, you bought one once . . . Could you use another one, new, at a discount?”

  “When did we buy that?”

  “Hmm . . . 1984.”

  “Sir, did you find a buried warehouse?”

  “No, we manufactured—”

  “No, unfortunately, we have no use for it. But, pardon me for asking, why did you manufacture it?”

  “It just happened, sir. Might you direct me to someone who could be a potential buyer? Perhaps some of your old clients, partners . . .”

  “I don’t wish to discourage you, sir, but I believe it belongs in a museum.”

  “Thank you for the information.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I tried everything I could, I said to myself as I went down to the hall.

  When I got there, they were all looking at me before I even said a word; a dazed aura was probably exuding from me.

  I yelled, “Stop the machines!”

  All eyes were on me, and the noise gradually thinned, the machines powered down. And then there was only a little clatter here and there. And then that stopped as well.

  Tense stillness.

  I began, “Listen, people . . .” I put my hand to my forehead, feeling giddy, as if pre-stroke. Then I took a deep breath and realized I could press on.

  “People . . . Oleg . . . Oleg probably won’t be coming back . . . The chances that he’s alive are slim. Things took a really ugly turn and now . . . I don’t think we should go on making this turbine.”

  I stopped, and they must have noticed I was struggling with something that was keeping me from continuing. I waited for it to pass.

  “I think everything is over.”

  I stared at the floor.

  “I can’t talk about hope anymore. . . . You’re working without pay. . . . If it means anything to you, I, too, am working without pay. . . . But . . . We should wrap this up. There, I’ve said it!”

  “Boss, what do you mean?” asked Branoš after a silence.

  “The chances are slim, very slim. . . . I think they’re nonexistent. I don’t believe we have a buyer anymore.”

  “There’s no chance?” asked Zulko.

  “Look, people, I can’t keep you here. . . . You can kill me, this is horrible for me. . . . I don’t think we have a chance. I can’t say it any other way than that.”

  All the faces looked at me, and all I could do was stand there, maskless. I thought about the day I came here as a stranger and watched Sobotka wandering through the plant, the cobwebs and dust. It will be the same again, I thought, and again I’ll be a stranger. I’d been haunted by this moment every night, the moment when we’d have to put a stop to things. This is the relationship in which we were cheating, Oleg and I. How could he say “Trust me” and then dump me here as the scapegoat?

  So that’s it, I removed my mask, airing everything in the open—I’m just one of the lies they fell for. It was hard for me to stand there, a stranger, and I was ashamed. What right did I have to stand there, what right did I have to speak? I thought they were going to rip me apart, or so imagined the guilty man inside me.

  Šeila had been telling me this wasn’t my fault. Maybe. Maybe, but somebody will have to take the blame, and there were no other candidates I could see.

  Ćamil raised his hand, started turning around frantically, and when he realized that everybody was already looking at him, he said, “I don’t buy it! I didn’t buy it from the start! But . . . But, since Sobotka is dead . . . those sons of bitches! . . . And since Oleg is, as you say, stuck in the middle of nowhere . . . And since Erol is missing and there’s a warrant on his head . . . I’m in favor of . . . of finishing the turbine! You can’t walk out on a half-finished job!”

  It’s just wishful thinking, I thought, rubbing my eyes. Then I heard a murmur, a murmur of approval. This was not how I’d envisioned stripping away the mask. Get it over with and be done with it. But I could feel something else in the murmur. They refused to accept the pointlessness of it, that all of this was pointless. My hand slid down over my eyes.

  “No way!” yelled somebody else.

  34

  SOMETIMES I COME out here and watch from the edge.

  I look down, through a gentle, clearing haze to see if there is still movement down there around the factory.

  My sheep are bleating; I finally became a shepherd, here, above the first tier of clouds.

  My sheep are bleating; sheep which are not mine but belong to two old women who don’t speak to each other and to whom, as they say, I am worth my weight in gold, so they will not give me up, should anyone come looking.

  And both keep asking how I ended up here, and each day I tell them a different Hamlet story, which never bothers them; they tell me different stories about how they ended up here as well. Sometimes I tell them Hamlet was the son of a good king, sometimes that he was the son of a bad king, and sometimes the son of an unknown king. And sometimes Hamlet was the son of all three kings at once—which was not a lie, though it sounds the least true. I say this to them, forcing them to sit together though they don’t converse, they just look straight at me.

  Hamlet wished to hear the truth from the last living king —I say—and knowing the king would lie, he had to come up with a show.

  Hamlet arrived at a lonely manor where the king came to fish by a mountain stream.

  Hamlet ambushed the king near the manor, pointed his weapon at him, and proceeded to fire questions at him in rage. But his indecisiveness surfaced so the king let him blow off steam, all the while lying, and then careless Hamlet gave the king the chance to point the weapon at him.

  So the king held his antemortem speech for Hamlet, disarmed.

  The king’s hair was long and black, streaked with gray, his frame big and stout, and his paunch rotund. Crestfallen Hamlet sat in the garden of the manor, as the king said: “It’s funny you should come for me to kill you again. And what choice do I have, now that you’re threatening me?”

  “Come again?” asked Hamlet.

  “This, it seems, is your fate. Yours and your real father’s, who was once the king of the streets, but whom you never met. You must have come here because of your other father, the king of the paupers, the one who began to punch above his weight and then all of you followed his lead, eh?”

  “Yes, I am here because of him. Are you the one who had him killed?”

  “What were you thinking? What am I with all of you strutting around? A passerby, a beggar you can send away from your doorstep?”

  “Tell me who you are,” said Hamlet.