Diary of Interrupted Days

by Dragan Todorovic

  Boris started travelling without his parents when he was a teenager, always to the West. At first, he behaved like every other Yugoslav tourist, shopping relentlessly, returning with dozens of records, jeans, and new sneakers. Later, when he was studying fine arts, he spent most of his time in museums and galleries. His favourite one was the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. That’s where he was first hit by an El Greco.

  When Boris turned eighteen, his father gave him a trip to Amsterdam as a present. On the highest shelf in a dusty bookstore run by an old Russian Jew near a canal in the red-light district, he found a rare edition of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and thought that it would be a nice way of saying thank you. The book was bound in leather and it had obviously changed hands many times before ending here: the cover was creased and rough like a wise old face. He hid it in his luggage when he returned to Belgrade because he wasn’t sure whether it was prohibited in Yugoslavia as it was in Russia—he believed it was.

  His father took the package, unwrapped it, thanked him curtly and put the book on a shelf in the living room next to the romantic literature his mother kept on display for her friends. Compared to the books around it, which were neat and looked brand new, the Solzhenitsyn looked out of place. In poor taste.

  When they sat together as a family for lunch—rarely, because Boris found myriad excuses not to take part—that book stared at him from the shelf. At first Boris thought his father put it there because the book was worn out and he loved his books untouched by anyone except himself. Once, when he was alone at home, he took it to the old bookbinder on the Boulevard of Revolution, to see if the cover could be fixed, or a new one made. The old man took the book in his hands, looked at it carefully from all sides, opened the cover, took one look from the top, and said, “This was done by a master. Keep it as it is, son.” Boris carried it home and put it back on the shelf.

  Several months later he finally read the book, and it became clear to him why his father had segregated the Gulag from the rest of his books. The General wanted his Russia to remain virginal. The book with the wise face screamed of murder and rape and pillage, and threatened to fill his utopia with cadavers. After that, Boris purposely chose a place at the table so that the book was just behind him: This is me, and this is not your Gorky.

  Even in the middle of the General’s reading fever, six years later, Gulag remained intact on the same shelf, among the books that were never consumed.

  “Look at these fields,” Miša said. “Look at the cherries, the apples. Everything is blooming unbelievably this year. Some old folks say it always happens in the war years here.”

  The orchards on the left were covered in soft pink and white clouds. Cotton puffs full of powder from the woman in the sky.

  Miša slowed down and reached for the pack of cigarettes that Boris had left on the dashboard.

  “Do you mind?”

  “No, go ahead,” Boris said.

  “Honestly, that’s what keeps me here. This greenery around us. I keep staring at the trees, who tell me, ‘It will be okay. All will be good again.’”

  “When you make the run to Budapest, do you ever think of not coming back?”

  Miša answered very quickly, and by that speed Boris knew that he was lying.

  Boris looked at his watch. Two-ten.

  On the May Day weekend the year Boris turned thirteen, the General took him on an outing to a military training ground outside Belgrade. The General and several of his high-ranking colleagues and their sons were gathering for a party put on by the old friend who ran the garrison.

  After meeting up in the Soldiers’ Club, they all climbed into a brand-new olive-green bus. A few of the older boys talked happily about the last such party, but Boris and the other younger children were mostly silent, not knowing what to expect. Twenty minutes later, the bus stopped and they got out. The weather was beautiful, Boris remembered. His mother made him wear the new brown sweater she had bought for him from a woman who had smuggledit in from Italy. It was too warm, but he didn’t dare take it off, because everyone else was buttoned up. The father-officers led their sons towards a group of soldiers standing by wooden crates that held ammunition and rifles. In the field in front of them were targets, some concentric circles and others shaped like men. This was the rifle range. Boris started to perspire. That sweater.

  Joking among themselves, the fathers each picked out new shiny rifles and went to the left side of the range. The soldiers, looking stern or maybe just a little nervous, distributed rifles to the boys and led them to the right, where they instructed the boys to lie down on the pieces of tarpaulin that were laid along the shallow trenches. Each boy was given instructions on how and when to shoot. The rifle was heavy, the stock was a little too big for Boris’s hand, but it still felt nice to hold it. Then a corporal raised a red flag, and the firing started. On the left side, the fathers let loose long, heavy bursts of fire, like a rowdy flock of woodpeckers. The wooden silhouettes split into pieces and new ones appeared in their place. Boris held his rifle tight, aimed, held his breath—he felt cold on his stomach through the tarpaulin—and fired. Again. And again.

  Their fathers eventually left off shooting to stand behind their sons as the soldier read out the results. Boris was by far the worst shooter of them all, worse than the younger children, even the boy who was only eleven and who needed the soldier who stood next to him to step on his rifle so the stock wouldn’t hit him. His father smiled and joked with the other fathers about it, but Boris knew he wasn’t too happy.

  Lunch was served right there on the field, beans and bread. After lunch, they walked a few hundred yards to a pockmarked area where there were deeper trenches. They were told to form a line and be very attentive: they were each about to throw a hand grenade. Not the real thing, a moustachioed sergeant explained—they contained only a fraction of the explosives—but they were still capable of blinding someone.

  Boris’s stomach was making odd noises. It was from that coldness in the trenches, and maybe from beans. He couldn’t get diarrhea now, not here, in the world of men he had just entered for the first time.

  One by one, the boys went into the trench, where the sergeant handed over a grenade. Each boy then removed the security pin, activated the grenade, and threw it towards the wooden model of a tank that stood some twenty yards away. Most of them couldn’t throw it that far, but they were given points for style.

  Boris was in the middle of the line. By the time it was his turn he was sweating profusely. He felt it was out of the question to refuse to do it, sighed, and stepped down into the trench. He must have been very pale because the sergeant asked him if he was all right. He nodded and took the grenade in his hand, surprisingly heavy for such a small thing. Boris still remembered the feel of his wet palm clenched around the metal pear. When he unscrewed the security cap and knocked the ignition capsule against a stone as instructed, he felt a jolt of terrible fear. He cocked his arm back behind his shoulder so forcefully the grenade flew out of his hand backwards, towards the other children in the line. The sergeant jumped on Boris, everyone hit the ground, and four seconds later, four years later, the grenade went off with a short, loud hiss. It was not only a dummy, it was defective.

  The rest of the boys did not get their chance to throw. Instead they were all loaded onto the bus and driven back to the garrison. His father did not say a word to him.

  Entering Novi Sad, Boris could not see any damage around them.

  “I told you they are using locators,” Miša said when he asked. “They are targeting bridges and selected factories. The army is down south, hidden somewhere, and in-Kosovo—that’s where they don’t aim much.”

  People on the streets seemed to be behaving as usual. He hadn’t known what to expect exactly, but he thought he would see men and women dragging sacks of flour, or boxes of food, something like that. What he saw were people sitting on the patios, at the sidewalk cafés, minding their own business.

  “I’ve seen pictu
res of some folks standing on bridges in Belgrade, protecting them with their lives,” he said.

  “That only happened once,” Miša said, “and it was a bunch of retards, or maybe some prisoners, I don’t know. On the first day of the bombing. Who would be crazy enough to do that?”

  The oh-shitters.

  Boris heard that term for the first time after the agency had won a contract worth seven million dollars. The bosses were so happy they called a meeting so that the team who made the pitch could explain how they did it.

  “The target audience for this project was the oh-shitters,” said Chris, the data miner on the team. “If you don’t understand what I’m saying, don’t worry—we coined the term especially for this pitch. Oh-shitters are people in their late forties to mid-fifties. They see an ad for savings, or that there’s a new all-time high for the lottery, and they suddenly realize how old they are and that they have no money to retire on. And they say, ‘Oh shit, I have to do something!’ So they go for the shortcut—the lottery, or murder, or sudden marriage—it all depends. We call someone who wakes up from his stupor in a flash and tries to do something about his life—but it’s already too late—an oh-shitter.”

  Boris immediately hated the word with such a passion that he mumbled an excuse about a headache and escaped the room. He went out for a smoke, and stayed out until the meeting was over.

  Sara and he talked about it at home, later that evening. She was as bothered as he. “What is wrong with people trying to fix their lives at any time, even one day before their deaths?”

  “Think of us,” Boris said. “The way my colleagues reason, we came here from Belgrade too late in our lives. The best we can hope for is to have the feeling that we’re secure, not any kind of actual security. We are bound to try lotteries of all sorts. Hell, our coming here was a lottery and every day on our calendar is another number in the drum. So we’re oh-shitters, too. All immigrants are.”

  After that incident on the rifle range, something between Boris and his father permanently changed. It was like their dialogue was now edited. The General never asked again about his school sports or offered to take him to any event that was related to the army. They continued to talk about the books that Boris read, though, and he became a voracious reader. For him, books were not about the art of writing but about the talent for building: they were cathedrals of mind, tunnels of love, bridges of despair, roads of whispers. He often wanted to draw the images that the pages left in his mind, and around the time of the incident with the grenade he started doing it. In his second year of high school (he was sixteen), his art professor told him that he was good enough to study painting. But Boris did not tell his parents that he had decided to follow this advice until after his father had placed Gulag on the shelf. That autumn Boris enrolled at Fine Arts.

  By the time he was in his early twenties, there was nothing about the son that the father approved of—not his choice of studies, or his friends, or destinations, or projections for the future. There was little help from his mother in all this. She was always on Boris’s side, but secretly. She never dared oppose the General’s opinions. That was unimaginable. There was only one commander in the house.

  Boris finished his studies a year before his father retired. As he started to participate in group exhibitions, the gap between his father and him became so wide that at times it seemed they spoke different languages. The General did not understand what Boris did and did not want to understand. “Is that what we fought for,” he complained, “so you boys can make fun of everything?” Boris was often on the verge of reminding his father that he did not fight at all in the Second World War—being only thirteen when it ended—but he did not want to go there. Or did not dare go there—he was still living with his parents, and wasn’t earning enough to go solo. Besides, he had already learned that a layer of frustration makes a good medium for art.

  What surprised him, though, was that his mother only came to see his first few exhibitions. Then she started finding excuses, and finally gave up on the excuses, too. She continued to brag about him in front of her friends, but she had chosen her side.

  “Someone stole my watch at the station in Belgrade. Can you imagine the dickheads—we are being bombed and they are stealing? What’s the time?”

  “Half an hour after the last time you asked.”

  “What do you say we make a break here in Novi Sad, before we cross the river, and have an espresso?”

  Boris nodded, and Miša turned onto a side street, then another one, and finally parked his vehicle close to the Danube. They found a café with a view of the river, sat on the patio and ordered their drinks. Boris stretched out his legs, lit a cigarette, and looked along the river at the remains of a bridge. Only the abutments at each end were still standing. On the hill across the river, the old Petrovaradin citadel looked as if it were made of candy: the marzipan headquarters, the marshmallow garrison, the meringue tower, the gingerbread walls.

  “Miša, how long do you think you’ll keep on driving this route?”

  Miša stared at the demolished bridge. “As long as there are roads. I have two kids. The boy is seven, the girl three. She has asthma and takes aminophylline. I get it from abroad because our drugstores often don’t have it. I need both the money from driving and the connections.”

  A tall young man brought their espressos.

  “Here, let me get this,” Miša said, then asked the waiter, “Brother, is the bridge still okay?”

  “Žeželj? It’s damaged, but you can still pass.”

  “Was it quiet this morning?”

  “Yeah. Not a sign of them.” The waiter took Miša’s money and turned to the next table.

  They drank their coffee in silence.

  “Let’s go, friend,” Miša finally said. “Another hour and we’ll be home.”

  Back at the minibus, Miša opened the hood to check the oil and radiator levels, closed it and got back in the cabin. He reached into the glove compartment, took out a cloth, and wiped his hands. Boris opened his bag to search for his toothbrush. He had a suspicion he had forgotten it in Toronto, but there it was. Miša turned the key. Nothing happened. He tried again, cursing. Nothing.

  “Electrical,” he said, opening his door. “I must have touched the wrong wire. Stay inside, it’ll be quick.”

  He lifted the hood again and Boris heard him banging some part of the engine. Then his head appeared from underneath the hood. “Try now.”

  Boris leaned to the left and turned the key. The engine started.

  Miša slammed the hood, climbed back into his seat, and pumped the gas a few times. The motor roared, and he eased the pressure, shifted, and they were on the road again.

  It took them five minutes to reach the bridge. It was some five hundred yards long—two elegant arches that touched in the middle of the river. Several policemen stood at an improvised checkpoint, turning all cars back. Miša slowed to a crawl, then stopped.

  “Hi, guys.”

  “Hello, sir. Where are you going?”

  “To Belgrade. I’m returning from Budapest.”

  Another officer who’d been standing by a police car noticed the minibus and came over to them. “Hi, Miša,” he said, lightly touching the brim of his cap. “Another round, you lunatic?”

  “You know how it is, brother, the smart ones are leaving and the fools are helping them.”

  The policeman laughed. “Okay, you can go this one time, but you have to find another route. I might not be able to let you through again. We’ve been ordered to let only emergency vehicles pass. I think our generals presume that if no one drives across it, the criminals won’t bomb it. This being the only bridge still standing …”

  “Thanks, man. I owe you one.” Miša shifted into first gear and left it there as they crept forward. Boris soon saw why: there were cracks in the asphalt starting about a hundred yards from the bank. They were alone on the bridge. It was probably too dangerous for more than one vehicle at a time to drive o
ver. Miša swerved left and right, trying to avoid the cracks, but it was not always possible. Then, some two hundred yards from the far riverbank, the engine coughed once, and died. Miša tried the ignition, but nothing happened.

  “Can you believe this shit?”

  “What do we do now?” Boris said.

  “Well we can’t call a tow truck. I have to fix it.”

  They both got out. Miša grabbed his toolbox from the back of the minibus, opened the hood, and started fiddling with a screwdriver. Boris walked a few yards to the railing, then turned to Miša. “Is it okay if I take a look at the city? I’ll just be over there,” he said, pointing to a spot where the arches dived towards the river, leaving a good view.

  “I don’t need you here,” Miša said. “But don’t go too far. I hope I’ll be able to fix this fast.”

  It was strange to stand on a deserted bridge. There were no birds. The city was far enough away that the gurgle of the Danube overrode its constant hum. Small rivers are leafy-green, and bigger ones turn greyish. This river had that steely surface of power. He started whistling, quietly. An der schönen blauen Donau. Strauss, what else. Not The Blue Danube. It was On the Beautiful Blue Danube. Boris smiled. Of course the river was never blue, but for court artists everything had to be schön and blau.

  He looked back. Miša still had his head under the hood.

  Boris leaned over the railing. The sun appeared behind one of the clouds that hung above the city as if forgotten from yesterday, and his shadow stretched out towards the Petrovaradin fortress. The shadows of the railings made his silhouette look like it was behind bars. He stared at it, thinking there was a seed of a new project right there. Perhaps something about reality not being three-dimensional but a flat projection onto the minds of others. Or something about the light. Maybe there should be bars on a wall of pure white light. Dark vertical areas that would make the wall look taller.