Infidelities

by Josip Novakovich

  The phone rang. His wife walked toward it, but he grabbed her and said, “Don’t answer.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t know who is calling.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  The phone rang again, and Marko guarded it, lest a family member should answer. They are attacking me whichever way they can, Marko thought. With light, with darkness, with sound, with silence, from without and within.

  “Go get yourself a bottle of beer,” said Dara. “You are getting too weird, relax.”

  “That’s not a bad idea, except I think that if I drank one bottle of beer, I’d vomit it; just the thought of it turns my stomach.” And he burped as though he’d had a case of beer.

  “So, you plan to sit here and grow crazier and crazier? We better go. At this point, even going to Serbia would be better. At least nobody is bombing it.”

  “True, but you’re a Croat,” he said.

  “They needn’t know.”

  “They would.”

  “How? And so what?”

  “Everybody knows everything.”

  “There you go again. Let’s just pack.”

  She looked at him with contempt. He wondered whether she was contemptuous because of his poor sexual prowess. She looked pretty with the light creating a refracting aura through her hair, with tinges of greens and blues. And so the contempt was all the more irritating. She thinks I can’t do anything, that I’m too scared to go anywhere. Am I? No, it takes more courage to stay than to run. But look, she’s sure that I can’t go, and she’s just taunting me, out of habit. Maybe she doesn’t even want to go, she just wants to create some blame for me.

  “All right, by God, let’s do it!” he shouted.

  She recoiled back from him, in surprise. Perhaps she had counted on his saying no. He enjoyed the surprise. Plus, indeed, a change of any kind might be better than waiting, cooped up, until something irreparable could happen as it already had.

  Silently they loaded up family documents, pictures, a few inherited things, such as her cuckoo clock, his grandfather’s saber with fancy silverwork, several children’s toys (worthless, but precious to the children at the moment), shoes, silverware, children’s first drawings.

  “Where are we going?” asked Mila.

  “We are going skiing in the Slovenian Alps, just like the last year,” said Marko.

  “That’s great!” she said.

  “Don’t lie to the child,” Dara said.

  “Now how do you know that we won’t end up there, ha?” Marko said.

  Danko agreed to go anywhere cold only if he got a bar of chocolate. Marko gave it to him, and the child chewed it and sucked on it.

  As they drove out of town westward at sunset, they would pass by his shop.

  On street corners strolled the Croatian soldiers. In the beginning, there was only Croatian police, now there was some kind of army, assembled from who knows where. By physiognomies, Marko could tell there were even foreign mercenaries here; Dutch and British soccer hooligans, with tattoos on their forearms and cheeks, and there were Croats from the Bosnian mountains, bonier and taller than the Croatian Slavonian peasants. So did these guys plunder? They were total strangers, invaders in the name of defense. Maybe only some of them did, maybe all of them did, who could tell? Who destroyed the shops?

  He thought he wouldn’t even bother to look at it. What would be the point? He wouldn’t look at it, as though he were leaving Sodom. But as they neared the location of his shop, he noticed several people carrying something, and so he couldn’t resist.

  Red light from the setting sun flickered and flashed from where his shop should be. When he passed the glare, he noticed that his shop had new glass windows. He stopped and got out of the car.

  “Oh, there you are!” said Branko through his pursed lips, which, instead of a cigarette, held large nails.

  “What’s going on? Who’s taking over my shop?” asked Marko.

  “I’ve been trying to call you like crazy, but you don’t pick up the fucking phone!”

  “So, who has stolen my shop?”

  “Nobody, man. We all agreed that it was a terrible thing that happened to you, and so we are rebuilding your shop.”

  “How’s that? First you tear it down and then you build it?”

  “Listen, we are all old townsfolk here. It’s the outsiders—true, Croats, but who knows from where—who got into the war to pillage and plunder. They hope to plunder in the Serb villages, but for now, before they succeed to get there, they’ll plunder here. You think it matters to them who is who? No, they want booty, war booty. It’s business. Your goods are already sold, probably on the way to Serbia, and the money is in some soldiers’ pockets.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said another old school friend of his, Ivan, who flunked out of vet school and now ran a large junkyard west of town.

  “They couldn’t plunder your yard, though,” said Marko.

  “No!” laughed Ivan. “I chose my profession wisely.”

  The men continued working.

  Marko walked back to the car and told his wife what he’d just heard. Marko turned on the ignition, and they continued driving. They passed by several shops, a bakery, a bar, most of which were Croat-owned. They were all demolished. Some were being repaired, others stayed gaping, wounded, obscene, and some kept smoldering, with wet rancid smoke barely rising above the ground, drifting dustily.

  What to say? Was the sight reassuring? Yes, Marko found it reassuring. He was not singled out. And now, he was touched.

  “What are you waiting for?” Dara said. “You are changing your mind?”

  “Yeah, maybe it’s all going to be all right here.”

  “You find all this comforting? Well, they’ll burn down your shop again. They are just waiting for you to fill it up with sausages and cheese first. Let’s keep going!”

  Marko drove on, slowly, hoping to come up with a good argument to turn back, not to drive in a loop through Hungary into Vojvodina and Serbia.

  Suddenly, after a curve, he saw flames. He stopped. There were two barrels, with the flames providing the light and heat. Checkpoint. But whose? Either way, he didn’t want to be checked and interrogated; he couldn’t trust anybody. But they must have seen the car, despite his turning the lights off. In the dark, the stars were sharp, wonderfully luminous. Too bad he couldn’t enjoy the moment of beauty in the darkness, or perhaps because of the darkness, he in fact did enjoy it? What if it turned out to be his last moment? In the cosmic sense, it made no difference.

  “What are you paralyzed for?” asked Dara. “Don’t you see who it is? Don’t you listen to the radio?”

  He stared ahead at the checkpoint, and suddenly discerned that the four soldiers, two seated and two strolling, wore helmets. Blue helmets! The UN had set up checkpoints, to separate the warring parties. He laughed with relief. No need to be cosmic yet. A sign appropriate for a wall flashed in his mind: UN Friend and Protector of Small and Oppressed Nations. He drove, the Nepali soldiers stopped him, and asked him in English, something he didn’t understand. One soldier read in the dictionary. “Oruzje? Bombe?”

  “Of course not,” Marko said.

  They searched the trunk. “Slivovitz?”

  “No,” he said.

  JUST AS THEY PASSED the checkpoint, Marko said, “Boy, it’s getting late. Are you sure you want to keep going; you want to look for a hotel in Hungary?”

  “Not that I want to, but that’s the thing to do.”

  “I think it’s much simpler to go back and sleep in our house.”

  She yawned. “Well, maybe you are right. And then we could start early in the morning.”

  And so they drove through the UN checkpoint, where they were asked the same questions, as though in the ten minutes of absence they might have loaded up the trunk with grenades.

  On the way back, they saw flames leaping out of the windows
of many houses. They realized that the houses on fire belonged to the Serbs who had left and joined the Serb army. Anxiously they drove home, wondering whether the same thing had happened to their house. What were the UN soldiers doing. Observing?

  Their house was intact. It was cold, and they had run out of heating oil. They all cuddled in one bed, covered with a thick down cover, and in the morning emerged like chicks of different birds and various eggs from the same nest, shivering in the cold. Marko called up Branko, and soon Branko brought him thirty liters of heating oil.

  EVENTUALLY, the Serb army fled from the western Slavonian hills, pushed eastward, during the Croatian army’s first blitz offensive. Many people had grown thin in the war, from anxiety and bad nutrition, but some, including Marko, had put on a lot of weight. He used to live differently—everybody used to live differently—people used to walk in the town park, but the war knocked out the habit. They used to walk in the town square every evening, promanading the korzo—but they no longer did even though there was no threat of bombing from anywhere. The siege had changed the lifestyle. People now lived like Americans: they watched more television than before (and there were more channels now), and they ate bigger meals, as if the war had created an incurable appetite in the newly independent nation. Branko, too, had put on weight. And so, no wonder, when the two old friends got together in a basement café—during the war, most cafés moved into basements—they didn’t feel satisfied with a meal of chevapi and onion, and reminiscing about the old days when they had eaten better and wilder, they decided to go into the park, hunting for mushrooms. After all, it was King Bolete season. Considering that they managed to be friends even during the war, now that it was over, they trusted each other completely.

  They walked past the railroad tracks and steaming hot springs, past the hospital wing that had been blown by a one-ton bomb the same night that Marko’s neighbor perished. Marko was a little uneasy. “Let’s not go too far, there could be mines here.”

  “Not here, further up, outside of the town, yes, but not here. Chetniks never had control of the park.”

  They walked, staring at the ground, at the colorful leaves, trying to make out round shapes of ceps. They came to a spot, where a cross was raised, with an inscription that read: To Virgin Mary, who appeared to me on this spot and spoke to me when I wanted to kill myself. A flower wreath was hung over the cross. Both men laughed at the sight; there was an inflation of Virgin Mary appearances. Could only one do so much work? The cross was made with old planks of wood, perhaps from an old barn, hammered together with rusty nails, some of which bent because the wood was hard, probably oak, and the man nailing the wood perhaps had an unsteady, hurried, hand. A blue picture of the Virgin, with her head tilted, was nailed to the cross; even the white frame had grown blue in the rains. She had a small, narrow mouth, and raised her fingers on the right arm timidly, not even up to her ear. And as the two friends laughed, and walked further up the hill, Marko stepped on a piece of metal, which squealed against his sole. He looked down, and he saw a round edge, a half-moon, of a mine tilting under his shoe. He gasped in terror, expecting the mine to go off any second. “Run, my friend,” he said to Branko. “I’m standing on a mine!”

  “Mother!” shouted Branko, and ran several paces, hid behind a tree, and looked at Marko’s feet.

  “Don’t move,” he shouted. “I’ll run and get help!”

  In fright, Marko was unable to move anyhow. The destroying angel glowed whiter. And the wind blew silently, carrying the washed-up piece of paper, with the image of the narrow mouth, above the fibrillating yellow leaves.

  And so he stood for half an hour, his heart pounding his ribs and making him so dizzy that he slid and lost his balance. On his way down, his sideburns and ear scraped and broke the cap of a gray-white destroying angel. His nose plunged into moist yellow beech leaves. He drew a delicious breath through the leaves, amazed that the mine was not going off. His hair had however turned completely white and from then on he was doomed to look saintly.

  Hail

  Large glistening drops descended slowly against a blue mountain cliff in the background. Delighting in the shushing sound of the downpour, Haris remembered one of the early Buddhist suttas: “I am free from anger, free from stubbornness; I am living for a night on the banks of the Mahi; my house is roofless, the fire is extinguished. Rain on now, O cloud, if you will!” Maybe that meant, Don’t worry and rejoice in the rain; or, attack me now that I am exposed and see whether I care.

  And only when the downpour came to his ridge and hit him, did he realize that it was a hailstorm—white ice, the size of sparrow eggs. For a moment he imagined the hail was sparrow eggs that could feed the whole Bosnian nation (except the nation was no longer whole, and never was). You’d collect the eggs and boil them, and eat them in the flimsy shells. To avoid the falling assembly of water stones, he walked under a canopy of pine trees.

  He sat in the lotus position, inhaling the aroma of rosin, while his pants grew soaked from the prickly ground. He buzzed Om to end his meditation, but instead of emptying his mind and attuning it to the harmony of the universe, he thought how coincidental it was that the electricity resistance unit was designated by the same sound, Ohm. He thought whimsically that his mind was an ohmmeter, and perhaps the harmony of the universe consisted not of going with the flow of the forces but in resisting it. He walked out bowing to avoid the low tree limbs—the needle rows on the branches resembled spacious garments on the arms of Jesus or some other loosely clad prophet who stretched out many hands as though he had become Shiva—and nearly bumped into Hasan, who said, “You’re talking to yourself?”

  Their sergeant passed by in a personal cloud of tobacco smoke.

  “This business of being Muslim is too hard,” Hasan said. “We should get wasted on slivovitz, and we aren’t allowed a drop!” He trumpeted his nose, whose tip, once released from the grip of the thumb and forefinger, changed from pink-white to glowing red. “A shot of brandy would cure me, I swear. A few jokes would help, too. Can you tell me a good one?”

  “Hum. Can’t think funny right now.”

  “If you can’t, I’ll tell you one. Coming home from Germany, Mujo drives into Tuzla in a new Mercedes, and he rolls down the window and waves to the people in the streets. Hey, what are you waving for? his friend Jamal says. Almost everybody now has a Mercedes. Yes, Mujo agrees, you are right about that, but not everybody has hands.” Hasan laughed and repeated the punch line, but Haris did not laugh.

  Hasan cleared his phlegmy throat and spat. “Whoever invented war should be killed—it’s so damned boring.”

  Haris took another deep breath, savoring the pines, and exhaled, feeling the hairs in his nostrils tickle. Perhaps he should have pulled out the nose hairs, but then, why would he? They probably filtered out the dust and now enhanced the smells. Snakes smell with their tongues, and who’s to say we don’t with our hairs?

  Hasan stared at him, with his bulging blue eyes, and said, “Oh, I understand. I am not exactly an enthusiast myself. I’ll let you in on a secret. I’d rather be sailing, but I was drafted.”

  The hailstorm was over and the last echoes of it exhaled a lush silence, and with his eyes closed Haris luxuriated in the aftermath beauty of the vanished sound.

  But the quiet was short-lived since Hasan continued talking. “How about you? Did they hound you down?”

  “I was a pacifist, still am, and I dodged the Yugoslav People’s Army draft. But in Sarajevo, the park I used to gaze at from my favorite café disappeared. People cut down the trees and burned them at home in pots and makeshift stoves, smoking up their apartments. The park became a bald meadow, with little tree stumps sticking out, like severed arms, with chopped hands gone, as though the trees had stolen—what, air?—and were then mutilated according to the Koran laws. I thought, you can’t take trees from us, and I volunteered.”

  The sergeant limped back out of his cloud and said, “What are you two jabbering about? Come
, join the group.”

  They followed him. “Our scouts are back,” said the commander, a husky man with a black-and-white beard (white on the cheeks and black on the chin). He pointed out two thin men, who looked smoked-out on cigarettes, with sunken cheeks and sparse yellow teeth.

  “Tell them what you told me,” said the commander.

  “Holy smoke,” said one of the scouts in an amazingly low voice, “we made it to their position. You can go around the mountain, and there are no obstacles. They have no idea that we are here.”

  “They don’t even have guards posted outside their camp,” said the other scout, blinking, while one side of his face twitched. “You can see them down there.” He invited the soldiers to the ridge and lent them his binoculars to see the men who roasted a pair of oxen on spits and placed lambs to cook in the chest cavities of the beasts.