“Go into the house!” she barked, so loudly that at first he flinched and stared at her with blank, bloodshot eyes, and then slowly turned to the terrace door and went in. She was left alone with the limp carcass in her arms, shocked and furious, unable to fathom who could have done such a thing. She went into the garden shed for a shovel, and then noticed a big plastic bag in the corner full of leaves and twigs. She grabbed it in one hand, juggling so as not to drop the cat in the other, and went on to the edge of the yard, which dropped steeply off to the river. She set the cat on the ground and shook the leaves and twigs from the bag. Crumbles of tiny dried slivers flew up in the air and got under her clothes and into her nose while she first pushed the head into the bag, then bent the back, breaking it, and, in the end, tucked in the stiffened paws. The bag tumbled down the slope after the twigs and leaves, and after some five feet it snagged on something. She tried to reach it with her foot to kick it off, but when she realized she wouldn’t be able to, she turned to look for help. There were no branches left, but her eyes were caught by the flower beds, edged with round white stones. She picked up the largest and from close up, winding her arm, she hit the plastic bag. Some ten seconds later, there was a light splosh, and nothing more to be seen. Brigita stood up and brushed the dust off, spitting:
“That shithead—what a fucking monster.” Just then her cell phone rang, and the secretary announced, her voice trembling:
“Mrs. Arsovska, I am calling to inform you of a tragic event”—and then she burst into tears. Brigita waited patiently at the other end of the line for the secretary to pull herself together.
15.
Hunger
hunger steals my touch
hunger steals my soul
now (fall 2010)
“You’re back! And the article is in my inbox,” the editor declared by way of a greeting. Nora instinctively moved her cell phone away from her ear with a deep sigh.
“And hello to you, too,” she greeted him politely, and then went on so he wouldn’t have a chance to launch into one of his sermons: “You won’t believe what just happened! This morning! I’m right on the spot; the press conference will be within the hour, or two at the most.”
“Nora, what are you talking about? Where are you? You cannot still be there! You’d have made it back from Beirut by now. Send the article in immediately; we’re in layout tomorrow.”
“The mayor’s been murdered.” Here she paused for effect, and when she could tell she had his attention, she went on: “Last night or early this morning. No public statement yet.” She raced through the words.
“What? Did I hear you correctly? You’re there?” She could hear the adrenaline surging through him at the breaking news.
“Yes, you heard me. I’m doing what I can to connect the dots.” Then, surprising herself, she added: “I can do this.” For a time, all she heard was silence; she could hear his brain working, the gears spinning.
“Oh fuck, fuck, fuck . . .” He seldom swore—only when he was at a total loss for a pithy, snide comment. “Fine, follow this through. Write down, word for word, everything you’re hearing and send it in.”
She made an effort to sound collected and professional. “As soon as I have something, I’ll be in touch.”
“So what’s up with our Anna Karenina?” Her editor sometimes liked sounding smarter than he actually was.
“Almost done. I have a meeting with the ex-principal, and then I’ll wrap it up. There you go. I’ll ask her about the mayor, too, given their history . . .”
He interrupted: “I’ll expect that this evening . . . By the latest tomorrow morning, with ribbons and a bow.”
“I’ll be in touch,” she answered.
“I’ll be waiting.”
When she’d hung up, she decided not to think about her Anna Karenina who wasn’t an Anna Karenina. Instead she wondered whether she should text Ms. Arsovska to remind her of their date, or simply keep to their agreement and head over to the Hotel Lav and wait for her. She decided it would be better not to text, which might give the ex-principal an opening to put off the meeting yet again. She left the eerily empty hotel lobby and stepped into the chill morning fog. In the distance, where the Vuka flowed into the Danube, was a large white stone cross that appeared ghostlike. Unable to take her eyes off it, she mused on the dense network of symbols you trek through in a life. If you don’t read them correctly, any step you take may be the wrong one—and, depending on how rigid is the society you live in, it might be your last. Actually, you are best off mastering the language of symbols to perfection. Otherwise, if you know them only intuitively and avoid considering their deeper meanings, simply embracing the symbols as reality, you’ll end up hoping against hope that the trek will turn out well. Intuitives, simpletons. On the other hand, if you know your symbols you can manipulate them—and also manipulate the people who run on instinct, using both as your weapons. The least useful is if you are cognizant of the symbols’ profound irrationality and work to expose them, without recognizing their value over time, or the sheer violence they have acquired. Turning away from the cross, she glanced at the red brick of several nearby apartment buildings, the area where Marko had said he lived. She imagined him in bed. Her thoughts were involuntary, just images taking shape in her mind without prompting. Marko was waking and moving around in bed, the sheets were white—“What is wrong with you?” she muttered to herself, and rummaged for the pack of cigarettes in her purse. On the surface the city still looked the same; nothing had changed since the night before. The only difference was that the city was at its most animated in the morning, particularly around the outdoor market, where the average age of the people breathing life into it was about sixty. She decided to take a walk and kill the half hour left before her appointment. She tugged the sleeves of her jacket over her hands. Her skin felt taut and dry. The last few years she’d been suffering from an unusual allergy: whenever there was a sudden change in temperature, whether from hot to cold or vice versa, all the exposed parts of her body reddened and itched unbearably. Simply put, her immune system was unable to adjust to sudden temperature changes, and she had no idea why. Her organism was attacking itself so it wouldn’t attack someone else: this was what she’d once read on the subject. She could tell that pale-red blotches were creeping across her face, and there was nothing she could do. She slipped through the crowd around the market tables of green stone and watched the faces of people who were closely examining the fruits and vegetables. She studied each face and couldn’t help playing her private game: subtract twenty years and reconstruct their lives. She imagined these same faces and the hands—picking through the peppers and lifting the tomatoes for a sniff—clenched in terror, or covering their ears; she saw people fleeing in panic, or pointing a finger, or toting a weapon, or raising their hands to cover their eyes. She stopped in front of a stand selling grapes—so dark they were almost black; small, but not thick-skinned. Her fingers of their own accord reached for one and popped it into her mouth. The juice was sweet, fragrant, as if it had grown in some other soil. Then a voice startled her.
“I don’t have much; I bring it along and if it doesn’t sell, at least I’m out and about with other folks,” said a man with gnarly hands like grape vines. “Take it, go ahead; you needn’t pay me if you’re just passing through.” His voice was in total contradiction to his appearance, pure and soft, almost shining. Nora looked at him for a long time, then asked for two pounds . . . no, four. He picked up a paper bag, and only then did Nora see the bad tremor in his hands; the grapes that spilled over when he tried to shovel them into the bag. His eyes were watery, as if about to pour out of their sockets. She didn’t have to imagine him. She looked down at the ground. This part of town was the only part of the city that had been renovated after the city was “liberated.” The rest lay in rubble for years, as if the authorities were afraid to rebuild what had been ravaged this way, so the marketp
lace area shone in contrast to the rubble. She’d seen the photographs: yellow façades, kitschy brick, red roof tiles, straight out of “Hansel and Gretel.” Soon after peaceful reintegration, word got out that there was yet another mass grave right there under the marketplace. They tore the whole place down again. Undoubtedly there were bits and pieces still down there, gold-chain necklaces and the like. The grapes rolled off over the ground, and when she stepped on one, it squished and went from black to red. Nora took the paper bag, overpaid, and thrust in her fingers. She scooped grapes into her mouth, closed her eyes. As soon as she turned the nearest corner, she tossed the rest into a trash can.
16.
People from the cities
blue light on blue faces
and a blue voice from the blue box
now (fall 2010)
He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. They’d roused him the night before around midnight, summoned him to the station just as he was starting to drive home, figuring that with so little traffic he’d be in bed in twenty minutes max. At the edge of town he swerved, cutting across double solid lines, and raced to Gundulićeva Street. His colleagues had secured the area and were holding anyone who might have seen something. A few tipsy kids had found the body. In a ditch, not far from the Serbian consulate, a man lay on his stomach, his face in the mud. They’d figured he was “dead drunk” when they spotted him stretched out like that and walked over to him, hooting and swigging booze. All they’d planned to take were his cigarettes; that’s what they kept saying. Digging through his pants pockets and the inside of his jacket, they thought he was breathing. Using a cell phone as a flashlight, they saw that the mud on the man’s temples was mixed with clotted blood. Then they panicked and fled, but the one who’d gotten blood on his hands decided it would be better to go to the police. The two others cursed his mother because they still weren’t home when the police came knocking at their doors that night, and their shocked parents nearly fainted dead away. The police soon rounded up all three kids and brought them back to the scene of the crime to question them. Inspector Grgić arrived to find quite a crowd, so he parked at the entrance to the consulate. There were clusters of people scattered throughout the courtyard, like dark magpies descending on a meadow. Death was nothing new in the city, but it was associated more often with massacres than with this sort of intimate affair; people found this variety more difficult. About a hundred feet away, across the road, stood a group of his colleagues led by the coroner. A little farther on, the father of one of the boys who’d found the body was having a heated dispute with a policeman, with allusions to an attorney and trauma. Grgić, without a word of greeting, addressing his colleagues with only a nod, strode over to the ditch and crouched by the lifeless body. A small spotlight shone on the bloody hair and the pale, mud-splattered face of Nikola Vrcić, junior reporter. There were gobs of saliva and half-digested food around his mouth, and his right arm, though still attached to his body, looked as if it weren’t his, or as if somebody had slapped it on as an afterthought, backwards, to his shoulder. Even a quick glance showed the death had been violent, but the cause wasn’t easy to pinpoint. A nasty blow to the head, bloodstains on the pale concrete of the freshly laid curb some five feet from the ditch, the battered body and probably a fractured arm. Traces of vomit on the face. Once the larger spotlights were set up, they could see skid marks. The inspector paced slowly around the scene of the crime, making larger and larger concentric circles and checking the night sky more often. It was dark and pierced by stars, at once clear and black, as deep autumnal nights sometimes are. Steam rose from his nostrils and mingled with the smoke from the cigarette he’d pinned between his fingers. He wasn’t supposed to be here at all; he should have left years ago. He’d seen everything at least once before—time was all that was needed for it all to be revealed. Over the last five years that Grgić had worked in the city, he wasn’t living, or rather, sleeping, here—if, indeed, he ever slept. His home was in a small town some fifteen miles away, where he’d moved after his divorce and his training in Zagreb. He’d spent the war attending high school in Germany and stayed on there for a time to avoid serving in the army, then he returned and enrolled, in the early 2000s, in a two-year course in forensic science. At the time he never figured he’d always be moving within the same circle of people, and that half the time he’d be on the other side of the law in order to be complete and functional. He jailed petty dealers, gamblers, the occasional pedophile or rapist, but, alone, he couldn’t break through the glass ceiling. To find a colleague who was willing not to take the line of least resistance was nearly impossible. The big fish he wanted and needed to lock up, the ones who had constructed and poisoned the system, were most often the very same people who, after he’d wrapped up an investigation successfully, decorated him with medals and meted out the praise. He had been following what was going over the last months in the city among the local powermongers; he’d followed the preparations for the privatization of the port, the games around bribery and the recording of the mayor, the appearance of a suspicious Romanian investor Ilinčić was pushing. The criminal activity fostered by the city leaders within the legal system was unfolding precisely as described in Criminal Organizations 101. Grgić knew he’d never make any headway if he attempted to clean up the criminality within the municipal ranks, but he was deeply aware nonetheless of what was going on around him. In that context, the violent death of the junior reporter looked to him like a private settling of accounts, if indeed it was deliberate, though he could already guess where the media speculation would go with this. Before he decided on any firmer conclusion, he glanced once more at the motionless body before he turned to walk back to the building of the consulate. In the reading room, on one of the chairs upholstered in green velvet, sat Velimirović, hunched over, his cell phone on his ear and his back to the door. The inspector stopped before entering and waited for Velimirović to finish, while straining to catch as much as he could of the conversation.
“Oh, yes, serious. Yes, yes. Very young . . . thirty-two . . . Look, the police are outside. We’ll insist on an in-depth investigation . . . Yes. Two weeks ago . . . He received letters. Sure . . .” He glanced over his shoulder, and when he spotted Inspector Grgić he abruptly cut short the conversation, communicating with him already with his eyes.
“Call you later. Bye.”
“Good evening,” Grgić greeted him as he stepped into the room and swept it with a glance.
“Not a good evening.” Velimirović rose from the chair, glowering.
“You’re right, not so good.” They both were silent for a moment, and then Grgić asked: “The two of you were together this evening?”
“Yes we were, as you’ve probably heard. There was a poetry reading here, and when it ended, people began to disperse, and Nikola came over to say goodbye, saying he’d go out and catch the poet to set a time tomorrow for an interview. It must have been an hour after that when the police came in and said some kids found him in a nearby ditch.” He stopped for a moment and then went on: “He didn’t get there by himself.”
“So do you suspect anybody?”
“You know our situation,” he said, trying to push things in that direction, just as Grgić had predicted.
“Yes? What situation? Would you be more specific?”
“Nikola was very active in the arena of minority rights, our local paper and so forth, and you can see for yourself what’s going on in town, how they’re smashing the signs, inflaming passions . . .” It was almost magnificent to observe Velimirović up close while he was doing what he did best.
“You’re suggesting that a person motivated by nationalism killed him?”
“I am not suggesting anything,” Velimirović suddenly hedged, throwing his hands in the air. “I’m just saying we mustn’t ignore what has been going on here recently.”
“Clearly,” confirmed Grgić, going along with Velimirović’s game. “
The two of you were close? Had he ever let on that somebody wished him harm?”
“There are plenty of bad people around,” Velimirović started saying, and then, suddenly, for the first time that evening, he remembered Nikola’s cell phone, which would end up, most likely, in the hands of the police, if it hadn’t already, and the messages they’d exchanged, and he broke out in a cold sweat. He knew he wasn’t listed on the phone under his real name, but it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to find their way to him if that was what they were after. Grgić immediately noticed the change in Velimirović’s demeanor, though even he couldn’t have guessed what had alarmed Velimirović. They’d been cautious, but nobody could have imagined that one of them would end up in a ditch. The last message sent had been about the previous night they’d spent in Nikola’s apartment.
“Do you have anything more to ask, or . . .” asked Velimirović, ashen.
“Not for now. I’ll have a word with the people outside, but we might summon you in the next few days to come down to the station and give another statement.” Velimirović nodded absently. Gray figures were still pecking about in the yard; they would have dispersed—by then it was after one o’clock in the morning—but the police wouldn’t let them leave. Grgić had gotten nothing more from them than statements like the one given by the woman who’d moderated the poetry reading: He followed the poet out and didn’t come back in. After the final investigation he went to the station to put the papers in order. He was done by three in the morning, and then dropped off to sleep in an office armchair. He was woken by a colleague who shook him by the shoulder. The day was dawning.
“Up off your ass. The mayor’s been murdered.” He thought he must be dreaming; he didn’t know where he was. He leaped to his feet. “Oh, fuck this life; everyone has gone crazy!” He splashed himself with water in the men’s room and then went out to see yet another corpse, and then he grabbed a cup of coffee before he’d give the single sentence at the press conference that applied to both: “No comment at present; our investigation is underway.”
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