by David Szalay
‘What the fuck is that?’
Hans-Pieter peers down at the wet napkin, the tiny object.
Murray is eating again.
After examining it for a while, Hans-Pieter says, ‘Shit, you know what I think it is?’
‘What?’
‘I think … I mean, I’m not sure … I think it’s one of those microchips.’
‘What microchips?’ Murray says, with his mouth full.
‘They use to identify animals.’
‘Animals?’
‘Yeah, like dogs,’ Hans-Pieter says.
Murray, after a moment, spits out what is in his mouth.
‘What are you saying?’ he pants, distraught. ‘Are you saying I’m eating a fucking dog?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hans-Pieter says.
‘Am I eating a dog?’ Murray shouts at him. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I don’t know …’
‘Am I eating a fucking dog?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hans-Pieter says, shocked and embarrassed by the shouting, and by the tears that are so unexpectedly now welling out of Murray’s eyes, that are starting on their way down his strong, flushed face.
Preposterously he tries to hide it, his face, with a scrap of paper napkin.
‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it,’ he mumbles.
Hans-Pieter looks helplessly at the Chinese woman overseeing the buffet.
With his face in his hands, Murray is sobbing openly now. He says something it’s hard to make out through the sobs, the wet fingers, the fraying paper napkin.
The Chinese woman has made eye contact with Hans-Pieter. She wants him to do something, to stop his friend upsetting her other patrons.
So Hans-Pieter puts a timid hand on Murray’s shoulder and suggests, in a low voice, that they leave.
4
Knocking. Knocking.
And voices.
Murray?
Murray?
Then silence, again.
Shame.
5
They meet at Džoker. Hans-Pieter and Damjan are already there. A few weeks have passed. Murray has not been seen much in that time, though Maria has sort of forgiven him – will let him sit quietly in the Umorni Putnik, even if she is still not speaking to him. He has not seen much of Hans-Pieter either. Hans-Pieter has been painting Maria’s flat, painting out the fluorescent orange with something less oppressive, less like living inside a migraine.
Murray fetches a Pan from Matteus, and joins Hans-Pieter and Damjan at the table near entrance, under the mirror.
‘Živjeli!’ It is the only Croatian word he knows.
He takes off his scarf. A cold front is moving across the flat land, laying down frosts in the morning, frosts that quickly melt to leave everything shining wet. ‘So,’ he says, sitting.
‘So,’ Hans-Pieter echoes, his face stippled with paint.
Damjan says nothing. There is a TV showing a Champions League match, with the sound off, and he is watching it.
‘We’ve not seen much of you, Murray,’ Hans-Pieter says.
‘No,’ Murray says. ‘I’ve been staying in.’
‘Okay.’
‘End of the month,’ Murray says. ‘You know.’
End of the month, money tight. Hans-Pieter knows. He nods. He says, ‘How are you?’
The question seems loaded. Murray looks at him suspiciously. ‘Okay. I suppose.’
‘You’ve not been out much?’
‘No. I said. I’ve been staying in.’
‘Okay.’ Hans-Pieter seems tense about something. He says, ‘I told Damjan about your situation.’
‘My situation? What situation?’
‘Your … Your life situation.’
‘What’s that mean?’ Murray looks at Damjan, who is watching the football. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Damjan thinks,’ Hans-Pieter says. He stops.
‘What’s he think?’
‘He thinks that maybe … Maybe …’
‘Maybe what?’
‘Maybe you are cursed,’ Hans-Pieter says.
Murray emits a strangled laugh. ‘What?’
Hans-Pieter appeals to Damjan, who is still staring at the TV, Real Madrid against someone. ‘Don’t you think that?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe,’ Damjan says, still following the match.
‘You had a similar problem, I think,’ Hans-Pieter says to him.
‘Yes.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Murray asks.
Hans-Pieter has some sympathy for this point of view. ‘It sounds weird.’
‘I was victim,’ Damjan says, ‘for five years. Victim of curse.’
The fact that it is Damjan saying this – Damjan, the tyre-fitter, a man even now unable to tear his eyes away from the football – prevents Murray from dismissing the whole thing out of hand as total fucking shite, as he undoubtedly would if it were Hans-Pieter alone putting the idea to him.
Still, he says, ‘This isn’t some kind of wind-up?’
Damjan turns to Hans-Pieter, who doesn’t know what a ‘wind-up’ is either.
‘You’re not taking the piss?’ Murray says. ‘This isn’t a joke?’
‘It’s not a joke,’ Hans-Pieter says.
Solemnly, Damjan explains. ‘I tell you, for five years I am victim. Okay. Everything is fuck up for me. Then I go to see lady. Powerful lady.’
Murray has a question. ‘What fuckin’ lady?’
‘Here, in the town.’
‘She is quite famous here, I think,’ Hans-Pieter puts in.
‘I hear about her,’ Damjan says. ‘I go. I see her. I pay to her five hundred kuna. And she help me. She take away this thing.’
‘Ah, bollocks,’ Murray scoffs. ‘Five hundred kuna?’
Damjan seems unwilling to joke about this, or treat it lightly in any way. He seems to find Murray’s attitude disrespectful. ‘Is not expensive,’ he says, ‘to take away this curse.’
‘It’s not so much,’ Hans-Pieter agrees. ‘Fifty euro?’
‘Who was it cursed you, then?’ Murray wants to know. ‘Who cursed me?’
Damjan just shrugs. The question doesn’t seem to interest him. ‘I don’t know. Impossible to know.’
Real Madrid score a spectacular goal.
‘You really believe this?’ Murray asks him.
‘I believe it, yes. I believe it.’
Damjan has noticed that something has happened in the football and is watching it again.
‘Smoke?’ Hans-Pieter suggests.
He and Murray stand outside, under the wet awning. The square is dark and dripping. The fountains are switched off. Pigeons huddle on the facades, high up, over unlit windows. There’s one other smoker there, a small furtive man with a trim beard who spends even more time in Džoker than Murray does. They exchange nods.
‘This is bullshit, isn’t it?’ Murray says.
Hans-Pieter’s hands are in the pockets of his enormous jeans – they seem to be made of various different shades of denim, stitched together haphazardly. The cigarette hangs wagging from his lip. He shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Damjan doesn’t think so, I suppose.’
Weird that, that Damjan, of all people, takes shite like this seriously. Turn out he does fucking yoga next. Murray says, ‘I mean, honestly …’
‘Maybe it’s worth a try,’ Hans-Pieter says.
‘It’s just shit, isn’t it?’
‘It’s only five hundred kuna.’
‘Only five hundred kuna! Fuck’s sake.’
‘Maybe she can help you …’
‘Do I look like I need help?’ Murray asks.
Hans-Pieter says nothing.
‘Fucking mumbo jumbo. Does she even speak English, this woman?’
*
Sunday. The last, dark Sunday of October. Even the rain has stopped. There is nowhere to hide on a day like this. Streets. Murray walks down them. Days and days he has spent in the flat, among the daguerreo
types, the old lady’s decrepit stuff – dresses still hanging damp in that huge wardrobe, funereal woodwork, moths moving on ancient fabric, eating at the velvet padding of mildewed hangers. The desolate atmosphere of musty, discolouring lace.
A few people, here and there, in the streets. Sounds, at least, of life. He will stay out until it is dark, he says to himself, just walking – though he has started to feel an unfamiliar, frightening stiffness in his joints this autumn, more and more as the weather gets wetter. In the mornings his hands hurt. His knees needle with pain on the stone steps of the house, in the vast silent stairwell. He has to stop, halfway up. Lean on the wall, working incandescent lungs.
A few people, here and there. The air is heavy with moisture. The trees are black with it. Leaves plaster the twisting streets near the main square. Unlit windows.
He feels totally desolate. It is something he notices, at a particular moment – that he feels totally desolate.
He is looking down at the wet leaves at his feet.
It is almost dark.
He takes out his phone and stands there for a minute. Then he does something he has never done. He phones Hans-Pieter.
‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Is that you?’
His voice sounds quiet there, under the empty trees.
‘It’s me – Murray. What you doing? Fancy a drink?’ He says, ‘Nowish? Okay. Okay. See you there.’
He puts his phone away.
Hans-Pieter said he was with ‘some people’. Who these people are, Murray has no idea. However, that Hans-Pieter now seems to have some sort of social life, as well as a woman, only deepens his sense of desolation.
They turn out to be Dutch pensioners, loads of them. They live permanently in the area, have taken over one of the villages a few kilometres outside town, and they appear to have adopted Hans-Pieter. They have just finished a lunch which went on all afternoon and when Murray joins them everyone is fairly tipsy, the wine-flushed Netherlanders shouting and laughing in their own language. Hans-Pieter is fully involved in this jolly scene. Stuck at the end of the long table, wedged in where there isn’t really space, more or less ignored even by Hans-Pieter, Murray does not feel very welcome.
There seems to be no possibility of the party ending soon – another mammoth drinks order has just been fulfilled by the waitress – so he leans over to Hans-Pieter, at whose elbow he is lurking, and says, ‘Look, I’m off, okay?’
Hans-Pieter has just shot a slivovica, the plum stuff they make here. His eyes are watering. His face is all mottled and hot. He does not try to persuade his friend to stay. He just says, ‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, I’m fucking sure,’ Murray tells him.
He has been sitting there for an hour without speaking to anybody.
‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I’ve got to go to Osijek tomorrow.’
‘Osijek? Why?’
‘To look at these minibuses,’ Murray says. ‘You know.’ He has spent a lot of time, the last few months, telling Hans-Pieter about this investment, about how the transport sector in this part of Croatia is underdeveloped, about the opportunities thus presented for a man like himself. ‘With Blago,’ he says.
Hans-Pieter seems surprised. ‘With Blago?’
‘Aye, with Blago.’ Murray notices Hans-Pieter’s expression – something odd about it. ‘Why? What is it?’
‘Nothing,’ Hans-Pieter says. A song has started up among the drunken Dutchlings, a noisy singalong. ‘It’s just I thought Blago went to Germany,’ Hans-Pieter says.
‘What you talking about?’
‘Someone told me … I think Blago’s in Germany or something. A job there,’ Hans-Pieter says.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Murray tells him. ‘We’re going to Osijek tomorrow. We’ve got minibuses to look at.’
‘Okay,’ Hans-Pieter says, turning back to his table of drunk, elderly friends. ‘I just heard he was in Germany.’
‘Who told you that?’ Murray almost has to shout over the loud, tuneless singing.
‘Someone told me. I don’t know. They said he’s got a job there. He’s not coming back. They said. I don’t know.’
Hans-Pieter is being encouraged to take part in the singing, which he now does, in a shy mumbly way.
Standing out in the raw night, Murray tries the number. Not even voicemail – a woman’s voice telling him something in Croatian. He tries the number again. Same thing. Same message. Number doesn’t exist. Something like that.
6
She does not speak English. Her daughter is there to translate. There is something wrong with her, the daughter. She needs help walking. Her voice is slurred. She looks weird. It’s hard to say how old she is. Maybe twenty.
Her mother – Vletka, Murray has been told her name is – instructs him to sit.
‘Please, sit down,’ the daughter says, with a sweet smile. She has a very sweet smile. Among strands of lank black hair, her ham-pink scalp is visible.
Murray, nervously, sits on a green velvet sofa.
There is something dead about the light in the room. It all arrives at one end, where curtains of yellowing lace half-hide a balcony hung with clothes-lines.
At the other end, facing the window, this velvet sofa, in which Murray now feels trapped, his feet hardly touching the brown carpet, stuff looming all around him. The place is low-ceilinged, oppressively so. Along one wall, there is a large sideboard. He catches sight of himself in a convex mirror, looking hideous. Vletka is lighting candles. The daughter smiles at him from where she is sitting at a small table placed against the wall opposite the sideboard. Next to her head, in tapestry, a tearful Jesus. Porcelain dogs clutter a shelf.
Vletka, lighting candles, says something snappishly.
The daughter translates, smiling: ‘Do you want some tea?’
‘I’m okay,’ Murray blurts, uneasily feeling the soft velvet with his hand.
The place wasn’t easy to find. It’s in a part of the town he doesn’t know, a twenty-minute taxi to a whole nother world of weather-stained estates, solemn cuboid structures separated by parked cars and dreary parks, hard paths under sad trees, deserted playgrounds, an electricity substation garlanded with barbed wire. Each of the buildings has a name – some Croatian hero. Murray was looking for Faust Vrančić House, number eleven.
He punched one-one into the entryphone and waited while crackly electric pulses sounded. Then a voice. ‘Da?’
‘It’s Murray,’ Murray said. ‘I’m here to see, uh, Vletka?’
The fizzing voice said, ‘Tko je to?’
‘Murray,’ Murray said again, louder. ‘I’ve come to see Vletka. Murray.’
A more high-pitched electric noise, insistent, and something happening in the door, a heavy metal door with safety-glass panels. Murray fought it open.
A pungent stairwell.
He was shitting himself.
She sits down on the sofa, Vletka. She’s in a dressing gown. A solid, surly woman, she seems to Murray. Like someone who sells you a train ticket to Zagreb, frowning at you through the perforated glass as you try to explain what it is you want, while the queue lengthens. Short hair. Little buds of gold in her earlobes. Breath that smells of cigarette smoke, bacteria.
She says something to Murray in a sharp, imperative voice.
‘She says you should relax,’ is the translation.
Murray’s mouth: strange munching movements. A fixed, terrified smile. She has taken one of his hands now.
He has this weird fear that she’s going to ask him to strip.
She doesn’t. She is staring into his eyes, though, which is almost worse. Her own eyes are greyish-brown. Her eyelashes are short and unfeminine. She has no eyebrows.
When Murray looks away, she snaps something at him.
‘Please, you should look into her eyes,’ the daughter tells him, more softly.
Murray does so.
Those fucking eyes. The stress of the stare is like some terrible sound that just won’t stop, a sq
uealing scraping of metal …
She’s still holding his hand, all damp in hers.
The stare softens perceptibly. She says something. Her voice sounds dry and detached.
‘She says you are in a very bad situation,’ the daughter says.
Murray, still holding the stare though it’s making his head hurt now, says, ‘Yeah?’
The room is hot. He is sweating. It’s not just the heat. It’s the sense that some sort of invasive procedure is taking place.
The daughter translates a brusque instruction: ‘Shut your eyes, please.’
He does.
Her mother’s hand is now on his face. The whole situation is so odd that this seems okay, sort of.
‘Is this about some curse?’ Murray asks, feeling safer with his eyes shut.
The daughter translates. Vletka answers.
‘She doesn’t know what it is,’ the daughter tells Murray. ‘Just that you are in –’ the same phrase – ‘a very bad situation.’
‘What does she mean by that?’ Murray says, his eyes still shut. Vletka’s hand has taken hold of his skull, the front of his skull, and is squeezing it quite hard.
The daughter translates.
The mother answers, sounding exasperated now, squeezing Murray’s skull still harder.
‘She says it is like a poison,’ the daughter finally says, after some follow-up questions in Croatian, while Murray waited, the strong points of Vletka’s hard fingers starting to hurt his head.
‘Poison? What’s that mean?’ he wants to know.
Vletka loudly shushes him.
An instruction arrives via her daughter’s polite voice: ‘Please, do not speak.’
The fingers are starting to properly hurt. It’s as though some metal instrument is being tightened on his head.
Suddenly, it stops.
He opens his eyes, tentatively, just in time to see the slap flying at him.
He feels the numb shock of it in his face. Then the heat arrives, intense, a moment later.
‘What the fuck was that for?’ he shouts, his hand at his stinging face.
Vletka is speaking at him angrily in her own language. Her hand is on his forehead now, applying pressure, or holding his head in place.