Behind him, in the distance, was Amsterdam. After the funeral, after he got his mother to Canada, he would leave her safe in their apartment in Toronto and travel to Amsterdam to explain everything. Or perhaps he should leave his mother in Budapest for a few days and go to Holland before going home. Right. That was better. He owed both Sara and Johnny an explanation.
He started walking away from the bus, his hands in the back pockets of his black jeans. Down there, on the surface of the river, his shadow was walking behind bars.
Strange, there were no birds at all.
He heard Miša rev the engine. He should go back. Or maybe Miša could just pick him up. The roaring went up and down, up and down—what was the man doing to his minibus? Perhaps he needed help.
Boris turned around. Miša was in front of the minibus, waving one hand towards the city behind them, beckoning with his other.
It took Boris several seconds to understand that what he had heard was not the engine of the small grey bus that melted with the road. It was the sound of a distant air-raid siren.
• TWO •
BLACK SNOW FALLING
DECONTAMINATION. September 6, 1992
“Okay, guys, can we stop the siren, please?”
The teenagers who had climbed onto the large bronze horse in the Square of the Republic, ashamed by the sudden attention of tens of thousands people upon them, turned the handle on the siren a few more times, then let go. Boris and Sara laughed at the sight of the grins on the kids’ faces morphing into blank stares as they tried to become invisible.
The man behind the microphone absentmindedly picked the strings of his Stratocaster. “We don’t need sirens to tell them they should run into shelters—that they should hide in the darkness, where they belong.”
He was tall, his big forehead creased by a few deep lines, three-day stubble on his square chin. His long black hair curled around the shoulders of his red leather jacket.
The seed of a melody started protruding through his strumming.
“They should crawl back under a stone with their horrors.”
A single female scream came from the crowd in front of the stage. Some other girl copied it way in the back, an echo of the first one. The drummer hit the bass pedal—one shot.
“They should be afraid of us.”
Shot.
“Very afraid.”
Shot.
“Because we have family over there. We have sisters in Zagreb, we have brothers in Sarajevo, we have our people there. And they are shooting at our people.”
A salvo of shots, and a gust of wind twisted a lock of hair over the man’s eyes.
“Not in our name!”
The crowd roared—“Johnny, Johnny!”—many raising their fists in the air. The drummer locked into the beat, the stormy bass followed, and Johnny flipped the middle switch on his guitar. The pickups held the last few notes he had played, distorting them. People in the first few rows, recognizing the song, started screaming and jumping. The wave lifted Sara and she began to dance beside Boris where they stood, a little to the right of the stage. Johnny grabbed the microphone stand, slid it up the strings of his guitar, and set his fury free:
Off the leash
They’re coming
Ravenous and angry
To break your personality
Saltier than the sea
I am the Angel of Revenge
My destiny is my lover
As with the people, so with the priest
As with the servant, so with his master.
The blazing sound devoured the Square of the Republic, banging against the museum on the other side, shaking the framed heads inside, ricocheting and exploding onto the surrounding streets. The sea of people filling every foot of the space became turbulent. Handwritten banners saying “NO to the War” and “Not in Our Name!” were raised high, as at least half of eighty thousand people sang every verse with Johnny. At the break he tortured the solo that everyone loved into a series of spastic, frantic chords, out of tune, out of rhythm, his left hand stretching the strings to their limit, creating pain and murderous wrath. People dancing close to the stage stopped dead under the onslaught, and some started crying. The crowd wanted to tear off their skin and bite into their veins, but Johnny made them sing with him, chopping his guitar and raising his fists, his long black hair wrapped around his head like Medusa, his navel exposed to the crowd.
I am the Angel of Revenge
My destiny is my lover
The band behind him speeding towards the climax, he hit a monster chord, then slid his fingers down the neck. Multiplied by the powerful, slow echo, his guitar sounded like the night itself screaming. The crowd erupted into a sustained roar.
As Johnny and the band left the stage, a young woman stepped to the microphone, but the crowd was so loud even the large speakers behind her did not help. She tried to speak several more times but the chanting did not stop, and she glanced offstage to look for Johnny. He ran back onto the stage, took the microphone from her hand, and waved to the audience to be silent.
“This is Belgrade,” he said. “This is 1992. Happy nations are preparing for the twenty-first century. Buddhists did it five hundred years ago.” He rode the small wave of laughter, then hushed it. “But we live in fear and isolation. Because one man has decided that our friends of yesterday are our targets today. We want to send them a message: You are not alone. This is not happening in our name. We love you, because we understand you, and you understand us. We talk the same language, our governments do not. You stop yours, we’ll stop ours, and together we shall overcome.”
He panned the crowd, waiting for applause to subside.
“I won’t tell you today to love one another. You know that. And I won’t tell you what to do. You know that, too. But I will tell you this: We are here together now but it’s only temporary. This protest will end and you will go home. You will be alone there because your fathers and your mothers are not on your side. It’s not easy to fight alone.
“Do not expect glory in this. Don’t fight for fame, don’t fight so a street can be named after you one day—the only real heroes are the unknown heroes. Instead fight for you. Fight for us. Because if you don’t, you won’t be able to tell your children where you were when the war started. And if you have to lie about your past, then what kind of future do we have? We need to scream until the whole world can hear us: Not in my name!”
The crowd roared the slogan after him, raising their fists. He kissed the girl next to him on the cheek, then gave her back the microphone and left the stage.
As Sara and Boris started retreating towards the bookstore at the back of the stage, where the organizers had set up their headquarters, she whispered, “I’ll just run to the washroom,” and she darted ahead.
In a minute, Boris saw the crowd parting in front of Johnny, and he stepped forward. “Nice, Che, and now let’s go to Fidel’s for a drink.” He slapped his friend’s shoulder.
Johnny laughed. “Where’s Sara?”
“She went to scare off your groupies.”
“I have to do a short interview, then we can all go somewhere for a drink. It won’t take long.”
Johnny started making his way through the backstage crowd, accepting hugs and handshakes left and right and trying to move as fast as he could. Boris, following, intercepted a plastic cup with beer aimed at Johnny. “I’m his official taster,” he said.
A politician was now onstage, thanking the protesters for turning out. Boris waited in front of the bookstore so he could finish off the beer. It was a good and peaceful protest; it felt for a moment as if the city had been thoroughly washed and decontaminated.
Four men in their early twenties disentangled from the crowd to Boris’s left. One of them—a skeletal guy in a jean jacket—touched him on the shoulder. He turned and saw a hand with a joint in it. He almost took it, then changed his mind and said, “Thanks. And I don’t think you should, either.”
“What do you mea
n?” said Skeleton.
“There are too many cops around. Right here, behind the stage, I can see at least ten suspicious faces. You don’t want to give them a chance to say this was a gathering of dopes.”
“Yeah?” Skeleton’s friend had close-cropped hair as black as his bomber jacket. “Well, however many cops you’ve found, I’ve just found another one.”
Boris stared at him. He was clearly the leader of the pack.
“Okay, buddy, eleven, whatever. Just take it somewhere else, will you?”
“Tell me, buddy, how come you don’t ask me where I found another cop? I saw you on TV the other day. You’re now a city face, giving interviews on television. A big shot. The son of General Bulic.”
“Listen, man, I don’t know what your problem is, but take it home, okay?”
“This is my home, you piece of shit! Your father and his imbeciles sent my brother to war. What are you even doing here? Bulic is not a Serbian name!”
Boris could smell the beer on the man’s breath as he and Skeleton and the two others crowded in on him. Then a blow caught the corner of his left eye and his vision blurred. His ear started ringing. A punch to his kidneys followed. Boris swung and missed, and the skinhead hit him in the stomach, winding him. He tried to protect his head with his hands and received several more punches to his ribs. Each hit was like a scream with no mouth. He heard someone yelling for them to stop but the blows kept coming. He tried to grab hold of something—anything—and felt someone’s hand. He opened his eyes: Sara, her face red, yelling at his attackers.
Skeleton was on the ground, gasping, Johnny standing above him. A man in a striped shirt tried to kick Johnny, but his own nose exploded into a bloody flower. Boris heard the cracking of the bone. The man yelled, stumbled backwards and fell across a plastic chair. Johnny shook off the pain from his fist. The skinhead and the fourth man—a short gorilla—circled, trying to find a way to attack him from different angles. The crowd around them suddenly opened and the heavy boot of Johnny’s drummer clobbered Gorilla’s balls.
Several of the artists had come out of the bookstore with drinks in their hands. One of them, small and fat and wobbly on his legs, yelled, “That’s right: screw the war! War is a collective effort, and therefore communism. We prefer man to man.”
Some of the bystanders laughed, and Johnny dropped his hands, stepping back.
Then Sara yelled, and Boris saw a knife in the skinhead’s hand. The crowd pushed back, widening the circle. Johnny grabbed a chair. His drummer was faster: his kick at the man’s knee was enough to send him down. Johnny stood on the knife.
THE CAB. September 29, 1992
Boris spent his days following the same routine: he would get up around ten, go out for some pastries and an espresso, take a long walk through the centre of Belgrade, come home, improvise a lunch, and then sit and read. In the evening, he would turn on the television or sometimes drop by the small video store down the street, rent a movie, and watch it over a plate of cold cuts. Afterwards he would read some more until he was so tired his eyes started to itch. Only then would he go to bed.
In the days of strained reflection that followed the fight on the square, Boris came to realize that his routine was much like his father’s had been: reading, watching TV, seeking out political news. There was a masochism in that: everywhere he turned, new people were coming to power. Not only in politically charged positions but in cultural institutions also. The publishing industry, media, theatres, even libraries. The regime had seeped into all the pores of public life and now was fortifying its posts. The process seemed based on negative selection—the worse the people were at the actual job, the better. Or perhaps it was Boris who had changed. To so many people around him the news sounded like a heroic symphony—maybe only he was out of key.
His mother always called in the early evening to check up on him. Somehow she had heard about the fight and she had apparently made a few calls. A man who presented himself as a police inspector came by one day to speak to Boris—who listened to him, then refused to pursue it. His mother would slip something in about his father when they talked—he hated Boris Yeltsin with a passion, his leg hurt again, he got a pocket watch from his party for his birthday—but Boris never rose to the bait. He knew enough about his father—he had seen him interviewed on the evening news, telling the world that he passionately supported the army intervention in Bosnia and Croatia against the separatist forces.
After the incident in the Square of the Republic, Boris had become cautious. His mother had asked him if he wanted a gun, but he knew where the question had come from and laughed it off. He took his long walks every day but kept changing his route. He had his morning espresso always in a different café, always sitting in a corner. Instead of making him feel safer, this hiding game—suggested by the policeman his mother had sent—turned him into an exile in his hometown.
Laughter did not work anymore, his food tasted like plastic, his cigarettes stank. There was a tension in him that brought a new intensity to his lovemaking, but his mood would sink surprisingly fast after an orgasm. His lovers seemed to like this new side of him. It felt like stealing pleasure from a well that would run dry someday. But in the middle of the night, Boris was empty, empty.
He had a few women around him who were occasional lovers. One was a doctor, two were art history students, and two others were journalists. All of them had their men: the doctor was married, and the rest had boyfriends. So there was no pressure. Everything was just for pleasure, and Boris made sure it stayed that way. When Nena, a tall, blond cello player in the symphony, started bringing food to his rented apartment close to Saint Marcus’s Church, quietly arranging things so that she would have to stay the night, he broke up with her.
He tried to pretend to himself that this had nothing to do with Sara.
One Friday evening, some months before the protest, Boris encountered her in Knez Mihailova Street. Johnny was on tour, and she had come out for a stroll and to buy some books. The air was mild, the streets were full, and Boris wanted to find an excuse to stay out longer instead of going home to finish the text for a catalogue he was working on. Sara did not seem to be in a hurry, either, so Boris invited her for a drink. They went into a restaurant on a side street, and after a couple of drinks she said she was hungry, so they ordered food. He talked graphic novels; she told him anecdotes about famous people she had interviewed. They laughed a lot. After dinner, Boris walked her home. In front of the building Sara invited him upstairs for coffee. It all seemed perfectly normal—a good, strong coffee was something he really needed if he wanted to do his homework that night. They went upstairs, and the coffee was followed by another drink, and another, and at three in the morning Boris called a cab. He got up to leave, and they stood by the door—his hand already on the doorknob—when he saw something different in Sara’s eyes, something that hadn’t ever been there before, and he leaned towards her. They kissed, his hand still on the doorknob, her hands limp and still. The intercom rang: the cab had arrived. Boris ran down the stairs.
Johnny’s tour lasted for three more weeks, but he didn’t seek her out. Neither of them ever mentioned that night again. Neither of them knew what that kiss meant.
Many times since then, Boris asked himself if he should have cancelled his cab. Every time he did, he reminded himself that she could have, but didn’t.
SHRINKING. October 12, 1992
“It feels somehow grey,” Johnny said. “Everything is totally grey to me now.”
Johnny’s rented apartment was on the fifth floor of an old building across from the Belgrade Zoo. From the armchair where Boris sat, he could see the Danube in the distance, glowing under the last rays of daylight. The wind was picking up and the large chestnut tree, whose highest branches reached Johnny’s windows, was getting balder with each new gust.
“It’s strange. You’re a musician and your colour perception has changed,” Boris said. “I’m into visuals and to me the sound has gone. Eve
rything is muted now. I miss majors: laughter, sex, flirting, joy, smiles, hugging. Everything I hear is in a minor key—sad stuff, ballads.”
Johnny went to the kitchen to get some more ice for their whisky. “When was the last time you heard a good joke?” he yelled back.
Boris tried to remember. Before he could come up with the answer, Johnny returned with a toy bucket full of ice cubes with a pink plastic shovel stuck inside. “I’m seriously thinking that there must have been a date when the jokes died,” he said.
“That’s a good title. You should write it down.”
“I did.”
“Is laughter just inappropriate now?”
Johnny looked at the pale line of scar on his right hand. “Well, we are all becoming more brutal.”
“I could do you a new poster,” Boris said. “‘Johnny in concert: He will rock you, he will roll you, he will make you scream.’ And below, in fine print: ‘In pain.’”
They laughed.
The intercom buzzed. Johnny went to the front door, picked up the handset, listened for a second, and said, “Boris is here too.” He pressed the button, turned the key in the lock, and returned to his seat. When Sara entered she hung up her umbrella, removed her black leather cap and shook her hair loose. Unbuttoning her jacket, she smiled at Boris. Her cheeks were slightly coloured from the wind, and her lips shiny with protective gloss. She was an inch taller than Boris in her high-heeled boots and had to bend a little when he stood up to hug her. She kissed him quickly on the lips and then touched the scar above his left eyebrow. “It hurts only when you laugh, right?”
“No, only when it’s not kissed.”
“Hey, what about me?” Johnny protested.
Sara sat on the armrest next to Johnny and said, “Guys, give me a drink. I want to celebrate.”
Diary of Interrupted Days Page 4