Several months after he began to work at the hospital, he had his diploma recognized and could work as a nurse again. In time, his colleagues learned to like him, but they still joked behind his back. He was a subject of research as much as an employee. A famous anecdote went like this: Once old professor Van Dijk, leading his students on morning rounds, found Tomo in the corridor pulling a trolley, pointed at him, and said, “A thousand guilders to the one who comes up with the correct diagnosis for this man!” The students tried several guesses, but the professor kept shaking his head. Finally, when everyone had exhausted their ideas of possible disorders, Van Dijk said, “He’s an exile, dear colleagues, an exile.”
Six years after leaving Croatia in 1992, Tomo went back home for the first time. Everyone else at the hospital chose summertime or the holidays for their trips, but Tomo went in October. “I want to see my people, not the seacoast,” he said. “In summer they are all elsewhere.” He came back in a strange mood. Physically, he looked refreshed, but there were lines of bitterness at the corners of his mouth, and he scarcely communicated with his colleagues. Before his trip he had had a kind word for everyone he met, and his patients still loved him, so his co-workers let time heal whatever it was that needed healing.
The Italian—as they now unofficially called the nameless man—was moved from intensive care into his own room. Tomo was warned to be quiet and unobtrusive when he took over for the night shift, since the man had suffered memory loss and was still recuperating from the coma. Tomo pulled his trolley with prescriptions to the front of the door and stepped on the brake. He only intended to check on the patient to see if everything was fine. He tiptoed into the semi-darkened room, listening to the man’s even breathing, and carefully approached the bed. Then he said, very quietly:
“You?”
• FOUR •
LOVE OFTEN FLIES OVER LIKETHAT
FRIDIANS. November 27, 1998
The first snowstorm of the season was still raging. The wind had died down, and the snowflakes that the light caught drifting outside were the size of coins. Toronto had lost its edges, swaddled in cotton as if it had been wounded and needed some peace and quiet to recover.
Boris stepped back from the window and returned to his seat. Dinner was over and the remains of the dessert were melting on the platter in the middle of the table. Their guests slouched in their chairs, chatting the Friday night away. The radio was playing jazz.
“You two never argue,” Selma said. “At least not in front of us. What’s your secret?”
“Look at their eyes,” Branko said. “They’re calm. They don’t give a fuck.”
“We once had a big family dinner at our place,” Nenad said. “I think it was my birthday, and there were three generations sitting next to one another. My granddad was about seventy at the time. He always impressed me as being calm and confident, but suddenly I noticed that his eyes were wide, as if he were staring at something horrific—he almost appeared insane. I thought it had something to do with old age, you know—shoulders bending, hips widening, perhaps eyes widening, too. I looked at my father and he had the expression too, but just barely. So I sneaked out to the bathroom, to look at myself in the mirror. I thought I was doomed: it had to be hereditary. But once I got here, to Canada, I realized what caused it: the slow grind of our old country. When you’re young, a long way from the end, and your hopes are high, all doors open for you, you can do anything. Then you are middle-aged, and everything goes into slow motion. You go to work every morning, you get your salary every month no matter whether it was a good month or not, maybe they promote you, maybe they don’t, maybe you have an affair with your colleague or maybe not, but there’s nothing you can change anymore and new doors are not opening for you anymore because you chose that one door so long ago—and now what? You slowly acquire that look of horror in your eyes. It’s not the fear of death. It’s the horror of life, of looking back at it.”
Branko was inspired to recite:
The stinking city opens its cheap joints
For workers who drink like dogs
Students without diplomas
Women without beauty
Homeless bachelors
Penniless travelers
Cheap music, heavy drinks
They fall for lotteries
I fall for horror.
“Fuck, that was a great song!” Nenad said. “‘I Fall for Horror.’ Johnny.”
“I still listen to it often,” Branko said. He turned to his hosts. “You don’t have any of Johnny’s records?”
“No,” Boris said as Sara answered, “We do,” quickly adding, “But only in digital format, on my Discman.”
Selma laughed. “Aha, this is a good time to start arguing, you two.”
“Before Johnny,” Branko said, “it was all ‘I love you, you don’t love me, I’m sad.’ And then he came along, and the music was suddenly about street fighters, about desperate loners, about our balls stuck in the machine—about us.”
“I have to admit that I miss that revolutionary feeling we used to have back then.” Nenad took another sip of his wine. “We felt like we were the centre of the world. Now I feel sidelined.”
“I am too full to start a revolution,” Lila interrupted, and everyone laughed. “A little Pepto-Bismol and I could change the world.”
“You’d need a megaphone, too. And a good dictionary,” Sara added.
“And plenty of toilet paper,” Nenad said.
“Speaking of dictionaries,” Selma said, “we all learned English at school, but that version was so fossilized, don’t you think? The other day I heard a piece on CBC, some guy doing a story about learning English. It was funny. The title was ‘In My Language I Am Smart.’”
“That says it all,” Sara said.
“You’re the smartest one among us, Boris,” Selma said. “You found a visual job. Good for you.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Boris replied. “Even shapes need translation. Colours have different meanings. Once, they gave me some Christmas project to design. I made a palette of winter colours: white for snow, grey for buildings, and red for fire. A touch of ice blue. It looked good to me. But when my boss saw it, his jaw dropped. ‘Where’s the green? Where’s the gold?’ He did not realize that I had never celebrated Christmas back home, that I didn’t share his colour code.”
“Where’s Johnny now, does anyone know?” Nenad said.
“I heard he disappeared when the war started,” Selma said. “They think he quietly emigrated.”
“Where to?”
“No one knows.”
“We have at home that last album he did,” Lila said, “the one that came out after he was gone. There’s a ballad on it, ‘The Mistress of Solitude.’ ‘Like the Mistress of Solitude she is pulling my strings.’ Unbelievable song. I’ve always wondered who the woman who inspired it was. What the hell did she do to deserve such a song?”
Boris glanced at Sara, who was motionless.
“Oh, good, we’re all Johnny’s groupies here,” Selma said.
Boris had met Nenad when he came to fix his computer. It turned out they had been working in different departments of the same company for two years, not knowing about each other. His wife, Lila, was also a programmer, though she used to be a high-ranking bank official in Belgrade.
Sara had found Branko and Selma in a bookstore. Branko, who had been a doctor back home, worked as a chiropractor, and Selma was studying to become a project coordinator in the software industry. The couples took turns hosting a dinner every Friday evening and they adopted the name Fridians for their group. Because of Friday, but also because of Freud.
“Children, we should be going if we don’t want to sleep here tonight,” Lila said.
They all turned to the window and stared at the white wall fluttering outside. Then everyone started getting ready to leave.
Half an hour later, with the dishwasher burping in the kitchen, Sara and Boris sat at the table finishing the wine. Us
ually, this sweetest part of their Fridays would start with one of them remembering something that someone had said, and then lead to a long conversation.
“I didn’t know you brought Johnny’s records,” Boris said.
“I didn’t. I found them all on the Internet.”
He took a sip of wine and lit a cigarette. “I should tell you something regarding Johnny,” he said.
She looked at him. “Why are we talking about Johnny now?” she said.
“We talked about him most of the evening, it seems.”
“But not about the Johnny I knew. They talked about the public Johnny. The private one is my private thing, and it should stay like that.”
They fell silent, both looking through the glass wall. A Dexter Gordon solo painted everything bluish.
“You’re not offended?” she asked.
“No, but do you miss him?”
“Boris.”
“Do you miss him?”
“I ask myself what happened to him. Don’t you?”
“What happened to him is what happened to all of us,” Boris said. “We had a life, the war came, we lost that life. We chose new identities and started again. Here, somewhere, anywhere else was good.”
“New identities? You think he’s hiding somewhere?”
“Hiding? Only in the way we are all hiding. But—no, that’s not what I meant. Look at the Fridians. We all used to be something else back there. But we hide it on our résumés. Overqualified? Dangerous. Remember Sasha’s interview in that theatre magazine? He claimed that he had single-handedly invented political theatre in Serbia, spitting on all those who came before him. The first banned theatre show there was in 1954, when Sasha was only a spermatozoid. He knew that not one of us would send in a correction. Why? Because we all lie a little. White lies, small stuff, but still—nobody draws a clear picture that would unite here and there, now and then. We think people here would not believe what we had and what we had to give up to emigrate. Others lie just because they can, and it’s tempting. Witnesses are few and far between, and most people just don’t care.”
Sara got up to walk to the window. She stood there, looking into the whiteness. Boris continued his soliloquy:
“This woman claims she was a well-known actress in Belgrade—we know that she was a junior producer in one of the theatres. But apparently she has always wanted to act, and now she is recreating her history in order to achieve her goals. That’s what hypnotizers do: they advertise themselves well to make their audience more susceptible. Actually, that’s a good metaphor for what we do: we hypnotize—others, but ourselves too.”
Sara was still silent. Boris remembered what this was about.
“Johnny is probably in Amsterdam, hypnotized into doing something new, as are the people around him.”
“Amsterdam?”
“Or not. But Amsterdam fits.”
She nodded slowly.
“Perhaps he’s not into music anymore. In fact he can’t be, or we would have heard about him. He’s apparently not into anything that draws attention. But I’m almost certain that he’s alive and well. Maybe even happy, I don’t know.”
“Happy?” Sara said, her back facing him. “Are you happy, Boris?”
He walked slowly to her, glass in hand. He was tipsy but not drunk. He hugged her.
“That’s a scary question, isn’t it? I’m not doing any art, so I’m probably not screaming with joy. But I’m with the woman I love, and we are not bad as a team, and that gives me happiness.”
She did not lean her head against his shoulder, although Boris thought this was the perfect moment to do it. He removed his arms, slowly, and stood beside her.
“Remember that night in September, when we first kissed? I’ve never asked you this, but—should I have cancelled that cab? Should I have stayed that night?”
Silence.
Finally she said, “I’ve always liked that you decided to leave, how you didn’t want to take advantage of the situation.”
“Do you love me, Sara?”
Silence.
“Do you?”
“Sometimes I do. But it all gets blurred. You, me, Johnny, the war, Toronto, Belgrade, all of it.”
He kept silent for a while. Then he said, “Well, that’s probably the best I can hope for.”
She heard something in his voice, something that nobody else would, and put her palm on his shoulder.
“This snow will cover the whole world,” he said.
LOVE AID. December 23, 1998
It was only a pattern on some silver foil, green salted with white schematic flakes, just a roll of cheap wrapping paper that she saw in the window of a drugstore, but it was enough to trigger Sara’s usual December melancholy. When she was a child, her parents would start bringing home presents long before the New Year’s tree would be standing in the corner of their living room. They would buy something on their way home from work and wrap it up in their bedroom before adding it to the pile. Her parents communicated most of the time in short, economic outbursts—this needs to be done tomorrow, you have to finish your homework by seven, we are going to Dubrovnik this year—as if too many words were a sign of bad manners. Thus, never sure what the others wanted, they never went for a single present.
When they were at work and the housekeeper was going about her usual chores, Sara would sit on the floor of the living room, staring at the stack of presents wrapped in colourful paper, spending hours trying to guess what was in each one, who bought it and who it was for. She knew early on that there was no Santa, but that only made her love the holidays more. Her parents’ usual fits of arguing would abate towards New Year’s Eve, and her family would enter some sort of ceasefire, where small errors would go unnoticed and the bigger ones, the ones that would normally prompt hours of quarrelling, would be noted but not addressed. If this wasn’t love, it was as close to love as they could muster.
After her parents had separated, Sara lived with her mother in their old apartment and—although the tree would still be positioned as usual—the whole magic of guessing was gone. Sara was eighteen when her grandmother died and she moved into her now-empty apartment on her own. Every December she would get two large parcels, one from her mom and one from Munich, where her father lived with his new wife. The boxes continued to arrive after she emigrated to Canada, always in those few working days between Christmas and New Year’s. Although her parents continued to pack many presents into their boxes, collected into a single package it felt like a one-time affair.
“They could parachute their parcels as well,” Sara once said to Boris. “Love Aid.”
This December was not helping her mood at all. Nothing bad was happening in their life, but the city was gloomy under heavy skies that always promised but rarely delivered the virgin white coat. She read somewhere about a special sun lamp, made for curing the sadness of dark winter days, but she could not bring herself to imagine that a small light bath would trick her brain into feeling chirpy again. The Canadian winter started too early, was too harsh, lasted too long, and covered all the beautiful bodies for months, making everyone a puritan. She could cope with cold, sunny days, the ones that—when they came—lifted her to a mountain in her imagination, or maybe to the porch of her father’s cottage back home. The sky of molten lead was dangerous for her.
She tried sex as a cure. One week in particular: she shaved her pubic hair, walked naked around the apartment, sucked the whole space into her vagina and put it out like a juicy summer fruit, stroked and sucked Boris a few times a day, fucking to find a path to the other side of gloom, but it did not work well. The more he filled her with his dick, the less strength she had to defend against emptiness.
One day in mid-December, walking in the underground streets at Yonge and Bloor, she ran into her old colleague, the Romanian clerk from Mr. Satt’s video store. She told Sara that Luz was in hospital, but she did not know which one. It was rumoured that she had attempted suicide. This was not a revelation—anyone wh
o had met Luz knew suicide had always been there as an option—but it contributed to Sara’s fund of sad thoughts. She thought of calling Mr. Satt and asking him where his wife was, but rejected the idea as too insensitive. Calling hospitals one by one? Not practical.
Unusually early, two days before Christmas, Sara got a parcel from Belgrade. It contained several presents, and she almost missed the envelope lying at the bottom, half-hidden under a flap of the box. She found three pieces of paper inside. The first one was a letter from her mother. It was not long: her mother was fine, she was going to travel to Slovenia with her current boyfriend to meet old friends for New Year’s. It ended with a question: did Sara recognize anything from this strange letter that she attached? A clumsy police inspector had brought it to her, asking for her help. He did not have much hope, but thought he’d ask, an international request, he said. He thought that Sara should see it because it mentioned certain events Sara had helped organize. Can you imagine that? They actually have records of your moves and dare to admit it? Really. However, the police would appreciate it if Sara could help in any way, because the poor man who wrote it had amnesia from a blow to the head, and they did not even know his name.
Sara unfolded the other paper. It was a facsimile, two pages, with an additional faded stamp registering it as from the files of the Belgrade police. She recognized the tiny, dense handwriting immediately.
Love often flies like that, imperceptibly over the evening and into the night. A quiver on your lips, a look over your shoulder, and caution until the next meeting. Reason withdraws before the temptation to forget.
A few days after I arrived here, I walked into a café that sat where the ocean meets a canal. There were no other customers there. The girl at the bar made me an espresso and I sat outside, on a balcony, looking at the ocean foaming in Amsterdam harbour. It was a grey, windy day, and the surface was of steel and anger.
Diary of Interrupted Days Page 16