“Ah, yes,” was all that Nora had to add to the man’s lyric excess, glancing at her watch. “Sorry, but I must get going; I have a meeting.” She tried to bring the lunch to an end while checking her cell phone, just as a text message flashed on the screen from Brigita Arsovska: I won’t be able to make it today . . . Tomorrow at the earliest. Greetings.
“One more thing I must tell you . . . You probably wondered whether this was pure happenstance that I came and sat at your table. It was not. You know, today is my wedding anniversary, and you remind me irresistibly of my wife—in her younger years, of course.”
“Please convey my warm regards to your wife,” she replied as she stood up from the table. She needed fresh air, exercise; she had accomplished almost nothing.
4.
Years of lead
a thousand years
open the door
unbuckle me
before (spring 2010)
“Scat, scat, children, Satan’s coming!” hollered Granny Anđa, shooing the children off the road and into the front yard. Never before had she seen a man with dark skin, though her Herzegovina relatives working in Germany, when they came back for the holidays, told of all sorts of men, and women, too, who walked freely about the streets, dark- or sallow-skinned, tattooed, alone or in couples, black and white together. Josip crouched by the wrought-iron gate, hiding behind his granny’s skirts, and when Satan himself, in a hat and long leather coat, walked by their house, Josip darted out and threw a stone at him, striking the man in the ankle. His granny shouted, “You little devil, Josip, git ye back in here!” and the dust-smeared children who had run up from the depths of the yard hollered: “Yaaaaa!”
Satan turned only once, already inured to slights during his brief stay in the Vojvodina village in northern Serbia, and looked with sadness into the eyes of the little boy who’d cast the stone. The child glared back at him, unblinking, defiant, and in the boy’s eyes there was nothing but an unchecked desire for destruction. Josip Ilinčić had been brought to Plavna, Vojvodina, on a special resettlement train when he was but a tiny bundle, in the company of his granny Anđa and his mother, Iva, only ten years after the end of World War II. His father stayed to work in Germany, and as soon as Josip finished eighth grade he was sent off to a seminary in Herzegovina, where his uncle lived. He was the middle child of a brood of five, bright and with no strong bonds to anyone, cold, incisive, with a future as a friar. One summer when he was just over eighteen, about to make his commitment to the life that had been chosen for him, he came home to visit his mother, grandmother, and younger sisters. At a village church fair he caught sight of Mariška, all flashing black eyes and pink cheeks. At night—after breathing in her boots, after gazing at her tanned neck and string of golden beads, after burning up with fever by the open window, his eyes stinging and his whole body aching—he made up his mind to approach her. Gaunt, tall, never one to crack a smile, he floundered when he found himself in the proximity of her free-flowing sensuality. The snub was not the worst thing that had ever happened to him, but he never forgot her teasing giggles and the jeers of the older boys and girls around her. They yelled Reverend and Hail Mary after him, while he, with measured steps, strode away from the lewd jibes that tore at his ears. When night fell, he waited for the darkest moment before dawn and went to Mariška’s house. From the street below he heaved in a flaming rock wrapped in gasoline-soaked gauze. When the first hungry flames licked the wooden beams, he strode back home with measured step. He did not return to the seminary; with the help of a friend of his uncle’s he enrolled in the school of law in Osijek.
The outbreak of war found him there. He was mustering resources to start a new movement for Croatia, sizzling with excitement at the very thought of all the weapons that would be rattling around him. His heart pounded faster at the sounds of the distant detonations approaching; the external state of incipient chaos was finally in sync with his inner self, understood by no one. He sniffed out the right people for the changes to come. Up onto the stage he clambered, sputtered all over the microphone, pumped his fist in the air. Every time someone said sir in a God-fearing voice, he knew for a certainty that they must be speaking to him. The most auspicious turn of events for him and his boys was when their country, which—as they’d announced to everyone—they were building anew, came under assault. This was perfect timing: he and his boys were compelled to rally to the country’s defense. Their reputation as defenders of the homeland was their only sliver of superiority over the crimes the other side was perpetrating, and for a few years they were lauded as heroes. When the collective madness began, the puzzle was a simple one to solve for the shrewder minds among them. What they required was a climate of fear, the flood of media articles on the attacks, the Chetniks, the enemies in our midst, and if the enemy failed to provide the fodder they needed, they’d cook up more discord themselves. The critical voices could be silenced readily enough using blackmail and threats; exceptions were rare. Special Police Officer Kirin, who had been dispatched to the negotiations, began raising his voice against the acts deliberately designed to incite strife, the attacks on Serbian civilians, the Croatian guns trained on Croatian villages. The more Ilinčić and his boys strove to persuade Kirin that this behavior was not serving our cause, the more intransigent Kirin became, until he was burned to death one day in a “car crash,” his car ablaze as it plunged off a bridge. Never was the man identified who’d driven the car that forced Kirin’s off the road; the police were too busy just then pursuing real criminals. The “car crash” gave Ilinčić and his boys the elbow room they wanted. Surviving Kirin’s death were his widow and twelve-year-old daughter. They were given well-meaning advice to accept the condolences, the flag, the medal, and then, at least for a time, clear out of Osijek. Everything else went smoothly, according to plan. By then so many people had been killed in the fighting that Josip and his boys were beginning to look like true-blue champions of the people. What would be the upside, anyway, of trumpeting the news to all and sundry that the battles, the bloodshed, and the sacrifice of an entire city had been concocted underground, in cahoots with the enemy? The ordinary people would never have understood how wars are really won anyway. Each of the two warring sides was led by a player of equal prowess. Ilinčić led one of the sides. At his behest the sun rose and set in Eastern Slavonia, and at his side every step of the way was a young man by the name of Schweppes, a bodyguard at the time, only nineteen, a murderer and criminal who’d come of age in the gambling establishments of the capital city. Schweppes was quick, agile, and invisible. Trailing behind him was a whole string of unsolved crimes, including an elegant car crash when, fancying himself the Hollywood tough guy and propelled by white-powder brashness, he forced the target and the target’s car into a ravine. Schweppes shadowed Ilinčić’s every step.
The other side was led by Stanko Velimirović. In November 1991, the esteemed Dr. Velimirović set aside everything else in his life to stand before the cameras of the international television crews, determined to bring down the last bastion of the Ustashas: the general hospital, crowded with civilians and the wounded. Under his watchful eye, drunken paramilitaries did what they did as if sober: they murdered the wounded, dumped the bodies in gaping pits in the ground, and raped all the women who’d stayed in the city. Shadowing Velimirović’s every step was a young man named Marko. Marko was an eighteen-year-old reservist, the sharpest sniper of his generation, loyal, silent, smart. Recruited from the rank and file of Yugoslav People’s Army regulars, he was a boy with no father, living with his ailing mother. Velimirović trusted Marko completely and commanded him—during the night the Serbs broke the seige and took control of the city—to organize security units for one of the mass graves, the pit. The next night, Marko showed up before dawn in Velimirović’s bedroom. He made the man’s wife kneel on the floor, bound her hands, duct-taped her face; Velimirović woke only when he felt a pistol muzzle thrust between his teeth, then
a blow to the temple. He couldn’t see in the dark; all he could hear was a hoarse whisper—Marko’s.
“Don’t you ever come looking for me again. For you, I’m dead. If you try, I have all the evidence; are you listening? The locations, the photographs, everything you’ve done; stored in a safe place. As you know, these times will, one day, be behind us. I’ve protected myself, and if anything happens to me or my mother, you’re done for.” Then he shoved the pistol muzzle once more against the roof of Velimirović’s mouth and, without a sound, left as he’d come. Velimirović didn’t fear violence, but he did fear a sharp mind, and he had no doubts about Marko’s. After that night, he pretended the two were strangers, though both of them went on living in the city and crossed paths now and then. When the Croats began moving back to the city during the peaceful reintegration, Velimirović stepped into the role of leader of the Serbian side. He was complicit enough in war crimes that his electorate trusted he wouldn’t be able to turn his back on their complicity. He was also eloquent enough to stand in front of TV cameras and on the city council.
Since the end of the war there’d been no moment as lucrative as this: the kerfuffle over the installation of signs throughout the city in the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet and the enraged response of local Croats, who defiantly tore down the Cyrillic signage.
The story behind the signs was a simple one. The law requiring that signs be installed on all municipal buildings in both the Croatian and Serbian alphabets had been passed some ten years after the return of the Croats to the city, at a moment when the government was being run by the right-wing Croatian political party. The party leader was an obsequious bureaucrat, while almighty Josip Ilinčić hunkered, powerful, in the shadows. When city hall began to roil with corruption scandals, evaporating renovation funds, wholesale nepotism, it became clear that the local government was about to lose the next election to more liberal Croatian parties. This was when the right wing devised a cunning plan: they’d create a coalition of their party and the party of the Serbian ethnic minority, whose ranks still included veterans from wartime paramilitaries. In exchange for joining this coalition, the Serbs demanded concessions, and the Croatian right wing was in no position to refuse. One of the concessions was that if the day should come when the number of Serbs living in the city were to top 33 percent of the population, Cyrillic signs would be installed on all the municipal buildings. This gave Serbian voters the impression that they’d won an important battle, while the Croatian right wing had no intention of ever actually following through.
Neither of the brilliant coalition partners anticipated, of course, that the day would ever dawn when they’d have to implement the law. When it did come, and when, again, demonstrations erupted, Velimirović and Ilinčić found ways to profit. The entire city was seething, and the mayor wasn’t handling any of this well, distracted as he was by having to buy support for his upcoming mandate.
The social unrest in the city turned out to be manna from heaven. The national government was searching for ways to distract attention from a third year of recession, so they spiced things up with the time-tested formula of inciting interethnic strife. Every morning when he scanned his newspapers and portals, Velimirović rubbed his hands with glee at the multitude of political manipulations that were suddenly possible. When he and Ilinčić bumped into each other in the corridors of city hall during those days, their nods to each were like silent high fives. After so many people had been killed in and around the city, stoking the situation to the white heat of conflict would be a breeze, wouldn’t it? The most recent flash point Velimirović knew of was the trouble facing the Croatian-language teacher who’d supposedly threatened schoolchildren on Facebook. This reminded him to call his media expert, a promising young reporter at Izbor, the local periodical for the Serbian ethnic minority, funded by the national budget but run directly from Velimirović’s desk.
“So, Nikola, how goes it?”
“Brilliant, Boss, I’m working on the new issue; we go into layout tomorrow. And how’s by you?”
“Splendid, Nikola, splendid! Thanks for asking . . . Any updates on that teacher?”
“Teacher? Oh, the one with the Facebook scandal? Sure, a few words, but to tell you the truth, I don’t see much there.”
“Nikola, my boy, if you write a strong text, something will surface. Get my drift?”
“Sure. You think I should?”
“I do.”
“Fine, I’ll have a look.”
“There you go, my boy; we don’t want our children being victimized in their classrooms,” chuckled Velimirović, and Nikola got the drift. The last text to be laid out the next day had as its headline: “The Street Spills Over into the Classroom.”
ÄÄÄ
We’re sinking
I’m not here
not there not here
This beggared belief. If only there were a way for her to wake up from this nightmare. It was morning, and Kristina was curled up in bed on her side, wide awake, her eyes closed, listening to Ante getting ready to leave. Recently he was going off to meetings bright and early: first a stop at the local bar, then to a shift spent guarding the municipal offices against the Cyrllic signs, then to the Veterans’ Association offices, then back to the bar, and then someone would roll him home in the dead of night. The night before last he was delivered in an ambulance; they carried him, only barely conscious, to his bed. First he’d drunk himself into a stupor and engaged in a fistfight with a policeman, and he ended up at the psychiatric ward. With him in the ambulance was Svetlana, a nurse, who worked on the ward and was also a neighbor in their apartment building. Although she was a Serb, Ante respected her; he’d grown accustomed to her and the homemade doughnuts she sometimes brought them. After they settled him in, Kristina and Svetlana went out onto the balcony for a smoke. His behavior was no longer embarrassing for Kristina. The hospital—in a city where, fifteen years earlier, some five thousand people had been killed—didn’t have a single psychologist on staff, though every home in the city had at least one family member suffering from PTSD. And PTSD, like every disease, did not afflict only the more upstanding members of society. Perhaps PTSD made the good people better and the bad people worse. After all her years of marriage, Kristina was clear about which category her husband belonged in. She didn’t even make the effort to ask Svetlana for the details; Svetlana jumped in to tell her without being asked.
“I’m standing there by the reception desk when I hear a man caterwauling: he’ll fuck their mothers, slit their throats, the shits . . . you know the routine . . .” Here she stopped.
“Oh, I do,” answered Kristina, wanting to spare both of them the repetition.
“And only then did I see it was him. He wouldn’t even let them help him walk, and he couldn’t walk, he kept jerking free. And then he saw me and suddenly stopped in his tracks, went all quiet, looked over at me, and said, ‘Gee, Ceca, sorry; I didn’t mean you.’”
“What an asshole,” said Kristina through clenched teeth.
“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” said Svetlana.
“Next time they should just leave him out on the street.” Kristina snorted.
“Well, what can you do . . . This trouble is bad. What the hell are they after with the signs and the Cyrillic; they’re driving people crazy. Who the fuck cares which alphabet they use on my pink slip.”
“Thanks, Svetlana.” Kristina was tired and needed time to herself. She’d had it. The harassment at school, Ante’s shenanigans—the insults and the drinking. She glanced from the balcony into the gloom of the apartment where his body lay sprawled out on the bed. She wished he’d never move again. That was two nights ago. As of yesterday, she’d called in sick. Because of the troubles at school. Now she was in bed, feigning sleep, hoping he’d leave her in peace and quiet. Maybe everything would be different if they’d had kids, but they didn’t. Maybe it would have been di
fferent if her father’s grave were out there somewhere, but it wasn’t. He had left at the very start of the war and never came back. Kristina was mature enough to understand that her parents didn’t love each other, and somewhere deep inside her she knew this was the real reason he left. The fact that his leaving just so happened to coincide with the outbreak of war, that he was a Serb, that she and her mother ended up in refugee accommodations in a tourist hotel on the Adriatic coast, that he was pronounced dead and later rumors reached them that he’d been seen in Belgrade—these things were nobody’s fault, least of all hers. Maybe things between her and Ante would have been at least a little different if there hadn’t been all those people talking behind his back, ignoring his war medals, whispering about what went on while he was an internee at the prison camp. Everything had come to a head, and life with him was unbearable. The only thing Kristina enjoyed was her job, her escape valve, and now that, too, was crumbling. She noticed Ante had begun tormenting her less; he seemed almost approving of the troubles she was having at school after what she’d written on Facebook. But nothing she did could ever fully convince him she could be trusted.
She didn’t have the strength to get up out of bed, not even after he’d slammed the door, not even after he came back and rang the doorbell loud and long. Must have forgotten something. After he buzzed the third time she finally pulled on her bathrobe and shouted:
“Here! Coming!”
She unlocked the door without checking through the peephole first to see who was out there, and then she was astonished. It was Dejan standing in the doorway. Fumbling, head bowed, backpack on back, he said, softly:
“Hey there . . .”
“Dejan, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you in school?” She could make no sense of this.
“I came to see how you’re doing.” He stared at the floor.
We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day Page 4