Open Me

by Lisa Locascio

  He took my hand as we walked.

  “I have known Søren since we were young, you see,” he went on. “He has always visited his uncle in the summers. He is not a mystery to me. He is a lonely man, angry at the world because he is angry with himself. Danes are a tender people who are ashamed of their tenderness and bury every pain. During the Second World War, Nazis occupied this country. Everyone you meet is the descendant of either a collaborator or a resistance fighter. Most people, both.”

  “But they helped so many Jewish people,” I said, remembering one of Søren’s history lessons.

  “They helped them because they were Danes in peril, because they hated the Nazis, not because they approved of their Jewishness. That is their way. They can never truly accept difference. If they lose the myth about the great ancient kingdom, they will recognize each other for what they are, a nation of lonely people who disapprove of each other’s loneliness.”

  I realized that Søren had never mentioned speaking to another person in all his days out of the apartment, save for the Madsen brothers who sold him hash. I saw him alone in the library, squinting at his screen. Transactional interactions seemed to be all he could stand. One night he had explained that the newscasters were discussing a newly released statistic, which held that one-third of all Danes were estranged from at least one member of their family.

  Zlatan fell silent. We came to the foot of the hill, got into the truck, and drove. The streets rolled past, a mandala coiling and uncoiling with us at its center.

  Gold sun painted golden ponies yet golder. Zlatan rooted in the back of the truck as I approached the fence. Four miniature horses stood at some distance, considering us warily. There was another animal, a little bigger with a different face. As all five began to approach I saw that it was a donkey, its fur a silvery down. Soon the donkey and horses were at the fence. The donkey was the friendliest, grinning and peeking at me from the corner of his eyes. I looked at my feet and saw little yellow and white flowers growing there among weeds, or what I thought were weeds, anyway. I wanted to pick a flower and feed it to the sweet donkey, see him close his eyes in pleasure as he ate the bloom. But maybe that wasn’t allowed.

  Geden came up behind me. Not Geden, I corrected myself. Zlatan. But what was in those names or any name that made him who he was? He was bigger and deeper than language.

  There was the sound of a hinge opening and then a crunching. I turned to see him slice a green apple in half with a bone-handled pocketknife. He handed one of the pieces to me.

  “Thanks, but I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “For the horses. Or the donkey, if you like.”

  I took the apple and let him show me how to hold it out to their mouths with my palm flat. The friendly little donkey came and sniffed it and held his mouth in a half-open grin, as if he couldn’t believe his good luck. In the donkey’s dark eyes was an animal wisdom, deep, stalwart. I took a shaky breath. Then one of the horses bounded over and ate the apple half in one bite. I cracked up.

  “A moment of poetry with the donkey, interrupted?” Geden said.

  “I guess,” I said, trying to catch my breath. I held out my hand and stroked the donkey’s soft ears. “How long do these little donkeys live?”

  “Ten years, fifteen.” He reached and scratched the donkey’s head, turning the soft taco ears over in his rough hands. “Maybe this one will last a little longer as he has a nice life. Even if he is blind.”

  “He’s blind?” I peered at the donkey’s eyes. “That’s sad.”

  Zlatan gave me the other half of the apple, took another apple from his pocket, and halved it, too. “Perhaps. But I think there is no reason to be sad for him,” he said and fed the donkey both halves. “Look at how much pleasure he finds.”

  The donkey gave me a demure smile, almost hopeful: You have something else for me, don’t you? And I did. He took the last apple half from my hand as gently as a kiss.

  We drove to the far end of Rold Skov and walked to the deepest part of the woods. Zlatan unzipped his backpack and spread a quilt on the ground, laying out a large clay jug, a big metal thermos, and two foil packets. He sat down and unwrapped the packets, revealing a loaf of bread and small grilled sausages on a bed of chopped onions. From the thermos he poured a thick pink soup of braised purple meat, islands of white sour cream, and a dusting of dill. The sausages were crisp on the outside, juicy on the inside, the bread like pita but fuller, richer, and the borscht cold and sweet. I drank almost all my broth before I remembered the jug.

  “What’s that?”

  “Herzegovinian wine. Tart.” He handed it to me.

  “No cups?”

  He laughed. “We must drink from the jug, in the way of true East Monkeys.”

  I hoisted the heavy jug. “I hope you know I don’t think you’re an East Monkey.”

  He sighed. “I know I am harsh about the Danes. Whatever their failings, they are the people who took my family in, who gave us homes and the opportunity at a new life. I am putting on a show for you, a little bit. I eat rye bread and smørrebrød like everyone else. It is not always a festival of Bosniak cuisine at my house. I brought these foods because I thought you might have tired of Danish cooking. And because I wanted to explain myself. Why we are doing this at all.” He looked at me until my face grew hot. “Am I not right? That is why we are together right now.”

  “So that you can explain yourself?”

  Zlatan drank from the jug for a long time before speaking.

  “You see, I once had a story. A tale that I liked to tell, which explained who I was and from where I came, that gave meaning to all of my wandering and shyness and inability to tolerate small conversation. My friendlessness and my resistance to even the smallest attempt to know me. It was a grandiose tale that began in Bosnia and ended here, in these very woods, where I fell on my knees and wept for the first time since we were driven, my family and I, from our home in Sarajevo. There were great peaks and deep nadirs to my story. A lovely sister named Renata with hair like flames, or pennies—I could never decide which, and pennies were so exotic, from America, like you—who was valiant and braver than us all and fell for her bravery. A great gray cat, Mače, which means ‘kitty,’ a banal name no Balkan child would ever give an animal, who died at the hands of the Serbs, a psychic symbol of the violence that was visited on us all. Whenever I told this story, I cried.” He closed his eyes.

  My throat was suddenly dry. I swigged more wine. “I thought you said you hadn’t cried since you left Bosnia.”

  He opened his eyes. “That is true. The tears, like the story, were a lie. I lied to everyone, every Dane who tried to grow close to me, to help me, to lift me from what they saw as my benighted state. I should tell you that I did this because I had yet to process my grief or because I was trying to gain friends by making my past seem more dramatic than it was, but none of that is true, no matter how hard I try to have compassion for my younger self. And really, by the time I stopped telling the lie I was not so young. Twenty-one, a man already.”

  Still older than I am now, I thought.

  “The truth, if there is a truth, is that I lied because I hated Denmark. I was livid at the Danes simply for existing, and then on top of existing they did all these tiny awful things without even realizing or thinking about them, all from their enormous sense of centerness. I saw how they looked at me when I spoke, with my rapidly disappearing accent, and even as I erased my accent miserably, desperately, I also wished to never know their tongue, nor to be able to decode the tiny network of slurs and ignorances that led them to treat my parents and grandparents and all the lost souls in the camp so badly. I told such a good story, Roxana, with wailing and Koranic Arabic and the third-act reveal that it was I who killed dear Mače, not the soldiers.” He looked at me hard, squinting as if it hurt to be seen.

  I looked back at him, tracing the dark places under his eyes with my gaze. “Did you really kill a cat?”

  He nodded grimly. “I have in
my life been required to put three poor cats out of their misery. One I ran over while learning to drive. Two my bastard neighbor Daniel fed to his pit bull. I did it with a shovel as quickly as possible.”

  I shuddered, thinking about Mushi. “That sounds awful.”

  He shrugged. “You see an animal suffering like that, you get over yourself pretty quick. But no, I never killed a cat in the way I told it in the story, with my bare hands, to heroically free my family from war-torn Bosnia.”

  We sat in the woods, food smells souring around us, my stomach upset, my vision smeared. His story weighed heavy in my mind. I worried that his magic was leaching out, creating a distance between us. I was leaving in three days now, nothing would happen, and maybe that was best. Who did I think I was to bandy myself about on so many waves, to feel so many things, to never be still, never be satisfied?

  He spoke again, his voice soft, his eyes far away. “I will tell you what I remember: From the kitchen window in the home where I lived until my thirteenth year I could see the river Miljacka flowing wide and brown under the ancient bridges. Everything we needed was on our street. The butcher, the grocer, the kafana where the adults spent every afternoon. Each day, after I returned from school, I ate the snack my father left for me in our narrow kitchen and then ran down the concrete staircase to play with my friend Sandar and romance his twin sister, Milena, who lived on the first floor. My grandparents had a flat a few streets over but they were in our home almost every day, my grandmother yelling at my father. He was the family cook, which she thought was an aberration of natural law. And my grandfather would play dominoes with my mother at the tiled table in front of the big window.”

  I sat very still, watching him as he spoke, not wanting to give him any reason to stop. Here it was, what I had wanted most of all: his story. He spoke steadily, in a hushed tone, as if telling a holy parable.

  “For a year before the war began the city was strange. Everyone was on edge. We knew trouble was coming, but everyone kept making excuses for the tension. It was the strange wind off the mountains, they’d say, or a funny cast to the air from industrial pollution. I was only a child. I did not follow the news or the arguments that my parents and grandparents began to have after dinner. Now their voices were low and tight. My father insisted that safety was most important and wanted us to leave immediately. My mother sided with her parents. She said that the reports were overblown, that the rhetoric would soon calm down and everyone would stop talking, crazily, of violence. I didn’t understand, Roxana. In my life there were no divisions between me and Sandar and Milena, who were Serbs, or between me and my friend Vladek, a Croat. Of course I understood that I was a Bosniak, a Muslim. But like many people we knew, we were Muslims in name only. My parents drank beer and my grandparents took rakia after dinner.”

  He hoisted the jug, took another long drink of wine, and went on.

  “In that strange year there were parties all the time. At my friends’ parents’ houses, the adults got drunk and danced. My parents had parties, too, elaborate ones with ten trays of sarma and ćevapi, like these”—he raised a little sausage—”and popara, bread soaked in boiling milk. Wonderful food, but I was not happy. No one was. Everyone just waited to be drunk. At a certain point in the evening, my parents screwed a red lightbulb into the ceiling fixture and turned off all the other lights so that the guests could dance. Even when the parties were adults only, I always came out of my bedroom when the red light was turned on. No one paid attention to me.

  “At the last party, Milena appeared. I hadn’t even known she was at the party, and then she stood before me, the girl I loved, and asked me to dance. We were the same height. In the red light her eyes looked violet. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. The song swelled, the singer weeping with all of us now, the violins screaming and climbing the walls.

  “‘Close your eyes,’ Milena said, and when I did, she kissed me.”

  He paused, and I realized I was holding my breath, there with him in the red-lit apartment, in the arms of the most beautiful girl. It did not feel so far from where we sat in the Danish woods.

  “I tried to put my arms around her but she had disappeared, like a ghost. So I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and turned on all the lights. I put my fingers in my ears to drown out the music, louder now because some of the guests were singing, sob-singing, the most terrible sound. It rose around me like a second room. I fell on my knees and vomited into the toilet until there was nothing left in my stomach.

  “The next day, or the next week, or the next month—I do not know when exactly, those days were so distended and unhappy—the war began. Everything made sense now: the crying, the drinking, the sick. Snipers shot at our apartment building, shattering the windows in Milena and Sandar’s apartment. This was before Srebrenica, before the war became famous. But it was already happening to us.”

  He fell silent. Seeing him there in his apartment, the party crumbling all around him, I wanted to give him something. I crawled behind him and enclosed his body in my arms. I held my palms over his heart and forehead, trying to only touch, not think. Eventually his pulse slowed to sleep and I lay back with him on top of me. When we woke the light in the forest had shifted. We were well into the afternoon, heading toward evening, our hours together dwindling.

  Zlatan’s green eyes opened and closed slowly. I turned him onto his back and kissed him. At first he didn’t respond. But then he sent his tongue into my mouth and we lay kissing under the canopy of birdsong and drifting high clouds, occasionally breaking to breathe before diving under again. He probed my mouth with his tongue, our torsos flush, fused at the navel. My hair full of hot wind and dust. I buzzed all over, sore in a way I hadn’t felt since the early days with Søren. So it was possible to be broken into all over again, to be made anew. So all my life I would open and close, and open and close again, and open again.

  By the time we returned to the house, the light had turned blue, signaling the beginning of the long hours of falling sun and rising moon before real dark. In Søren’s uncle’s flat, the indomitability of this time of day had overwhelmed me. I knew only the changing shades of his temper, the movement of shadows across the wood floor. Outside was nothing to me.

  Zlatan dug in the refrigerator, shooing me toward the bedroom. “Rest. I will prepare dinner.”

  “Let me cook for you,” I said, peering over his shoulder into the fridge. I wanted to feed him. To give him something, he who had given me so much. A piece of my body, my heart, that would enter his and become a part of him forever. “You can tell me the rest of your story.”

  “It was a long time ago, Roxana.” He reached over my head, took two beers from the refrigerator, and opened them with his teeth, kissing the lip of mine before he passed it to me.

  I held the cold bottle against my chest, awed by this trick. “Do you not want to tell me?”

  “Have I not always done as you ask?” He gave me a naughty look.

  I blushed. “You have.”

  “What do you wish to cook?”

  “Tacos,” I said automatically.

  He laughed. “Well. We do not have those breads, the thin soft ones. But beyond that you are welcome to do as you will with the contents of my refrigerator.”

  I went to it, took out a block of cheese, ground beef, lettuce. There were pitas, or something like them, like the ones we had had for lunch. In the bin beneath the sink, onions and garlic, and on the counter, tomatoes.

  “You have picked all of the American items. I was going to make you a cheeseburger,” Zlatan said.

  “Thank you,” I told him. “But today I want something different.”

  He spoke as I rendered the ingredients, bent them to my will.

  “We left in October, but I don’t remember the flight to Copenhagen, or the hours that followed. We were detained in customs for a long time, of course. Everything in the airport was gray, white, and silver. Cold. I was afraid to touch anything, afraid
I would soil the gleaming surfaces. It had been several days since I had had a shower; in the madness of leaving, no one had remembered to make me bathe. In Sarajevo, it was a silly game I played with my parents, trying to dodge a bath. But in Denmark such childishness was out of the question. I desperately wanted one. I worked myself into quite a state, imagining that my dirtiness would get my family ejected from this freezing, safe place.

  “The first Danes we saw must have been customs agents or policemen or humanitarian aid workers. I’m not sure. They all looked the same to me, tall and handsome, with pale hair and clear blue eyes. Of course there are short Danes, dark Danes, clumsy Danes. But on that first day, they all carried themselves so stiffly, with such great discipline. Their feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.

  “My parents acted like scared children, my grandparents like senile fools. They muttered in low voices, refusing eye contact. Only my mother could communicate with them in English. No one spoke our language. I was so scared that I started singing under my breath. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until my grandfather slapped me.

  “ ‘You’ve been singing for hours,’ he hissed. ‘Be quiet.’

  “He had never laid a hand on me before. I burst into tears and couldn’t stop shaking. The Danes noticed, but they didn’t say anything. They never say anything. My parents pleaded with me to calm down. Finally my mother pulled me into her arms. Still I did not stop crying for hours. I sobbed until I couldn’t breathe.”

  He was speaking to the middle distance, to the empty air. I stopped my busy hands and looked at him. Zlatan raised an eyebrow.

  “Please continue,” he said. “It is easier for me to talk to you if you are not arrayed in front of me like a committee I must convince. I have had a great deal of that, in my life.”

  I bowed my head, ashamed of my interest. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “Yes. But I want to,” Zlatan said, looking down. “It—heals something.”