He surprised her by not arguing. He said, “The old man has been moaning for months. How much longer can he go on? I couldn’t sleep; his fear got to me.”
And so, the couple trudged for two miles to the Baptist church; everything seemed to be two miles away, and the long blue buses with a large joint in the middle (so the body of the bus could make the curves) were nowhere in sight. In the church, after a song in the choir where both of them sang their souls out, the old and tall condorlike minister held a sermon about the end, when nation would rise against nation, brother against brother, and the earth would quake as never before. And he quoted Jesus’s words from Matthew, chapter 24, verse 9, “You will be hated by all the nations on account of my name.” He paused and in silence stared at the congregation, while his eyelids drew over his gray eyes and lifted again. He repeated an octave more deeply, “You will be hated by all the nations on account of my name.”
A partial confirmation of the prophecy came swiftly. Shards of glass splashed over the congregation, cutting several cheeks. People ducked on the floor, probably imagining there was another North Atantic Treaty Organization bomb blasting. Several bricks flew in, and shouts followed. “You American spies, we’ll show you your god today!”
“Damned novoverci (new believers)!”
A machine gun fired a round into the ceiling. Something resembling a hand grenade fell into the baptismal hole and did not explode but did make a splash, which startled Milka with its coldness. Wet, she trembled on the floor, and smelled urine—fear with its indignities.
The minister locked the door. The church was under siege by a mob.
The minister asked, “Does anybody have a gun here?”
One woman shouted, “A small pistol.”
“That’s not enough,” the minister said. “Let us then pray.”
In the middle of the prayer, he pulled out a cell phone to call the police, and he kept dialing.
But someone else must have alerted the police already. Just as the front door seemed ready to collapse from steady pounding, the police dispersed the crowd with tear gas.
A policeman shouted through the cracked door, “You can leave now. Everything’s all right.”
But the people, who were used to believing so much, could not believe this, and they still stayed inside; someone whispered, “It’s a trap. They organized the whole thing to begin with.”
However, when they peeked outside, the police seemed quite earnest. They were beating back drunken hooligans, one of whom fell on the ground with smashed-in teeth, bleeding from the mouth.
As Milka walked out with Drago, she thought, Maybe Caesar did provide after all. Or somebody’s prayer worked. Whose prayer could have done this? Who could pray that good? Or maybe God didn’t need prayers; he acted when people could not take more misery, so they could get refreshed, so the new misery would hurt doubly once it came. And she censored herself for thinking so.
But as they walked away, even the police taunted them. “How can you go to Clinton’s church?” That’s what the locals now called the Baptist church. They didn’t reply, but walked on, into darkening and narrowing streets. The sun must have just set, but as it was cloudy, dank darkness arose from the ground, as though darkness were a substance, a vapor that carried smells of the Danube, deep clay smells, with ghosts of rotting fish eggs that never came to life.
Several blocks later, four tall men with crew cuts caught up with the Zivkovics, and talked with them. “Where are you from?”
Milka noticed that one of them had an emblem with SSSS (CCCC in Cyrillic) which stood for Samo Sloga Srbe Spasava—“Only unity can save Serbs”—traditional Chetnik sign.
“Oh, don’t ask, from Lika,” Drago said. “Serbian Krajina.”
Another man, in a black T-shirt, even though it was a cold day, said, “That’s where my roots are. We got to stick together a little bit better, don’t you think?”
And another one, wearing a black leather jacket, said, “Why don’t you go back?”
“How would we? The Croats burned down our house to the ground so we wouldn’t come back.”
“You should have fought them,” the SSSS guy said.
“It’s easy for you to say, but we are too old to get involved. Besides, we are pacifists.”
“You should’ve gone to the States, novoverci.”
ALL THE WHILE, the Zivkovics were hastening their pace, but now the men surrounded them and stopped, and when Milka tried to walk on, they pushed her back. “Wait a minute, Old Whore, our conversation is not over yet.”
“Clinton and Gore and Albright, they are all Baptists!” shouted the fourth man, clutching a metal pipe. “Have you shaken hands with Clinton?”
The voices came quickly, and Milka couldn’t follow who was saying what; she did not look at the men, whose faces were contorted by aggression. Perhaps they were on speed besides being drunk on brandy.
“You, I am talking to you,” said the SSSS guy, pushing Milka back. “Have you sucked Clinton’s dick? Why didn’t you clench your teeth then, ha?”
“This is a religious war, Baptists against the Serb Orthodox!”
“You shine with your flashlights on our bridges and rails so the Vandal pilots could aim better?”
“Where do you get such an absurd idea?” Drago asked.
The SSSS man punched him in the nose, and blood covered Drago’s lips. He wiped them, and suddenly kicked the SSSS man in the groin, and the man writhed on the ground, but the T-shirt guy hit Drago on the jaw.
Milka cried, “Leave him alone, he has a heart condition.”
“He has a head condition. This should clear it!”
A brigand slammed Drago with a metal pipe above his left ear. The force of the swing brought Drago down onto the cobbles. The guy in the T-shirt kicked Drago’s thighs.
Milka tried to push them away, and to guard Drago, but the SSSS guy, now up and shrieking, punched her under her sternum so hard that she stood there, stunned, and for several seconds her vision was all bright gray, without any detail, and when her sight came back, in it swirled many limbs and sticks and boots, bursting and splashing. When she came to, still standing, the brigands were gone, and at her feet lay Drago, with blood covering his forehead.
Still dazed, unsure whether she was seeing right, she strained her eyes. Near his head glimmered rays of purple and red, her spilled river pearls playing with the crimson light of his blood.
She kneeled down, and leaned her good ear on his chest, waiting for heartbeats. His chest was warm. She thought she heard a faint beat, but perhaps it came from within her ear, from her own blood? She felt for his wrist pulse with her thumb, and again she felt weak beats. Were they her own? She put three fingertips against the tip of the radial bone, and with disbelief she felt his steady beats and then she heard him draw a wet breath. My God, she thought, how can we live through all of this? She was almost disappointed that this was not the end of suffering for her husband, but perhaps just the beginning. What would come next? How to find a doctor? There must be one. They were after all a block away from the medical school. The work ahead of her terrified her, but what choice was there? She looked around, expecting to see the desolate street, but instead beheld an old woman in a brown scarf who walked out of her yard with a bucket of water, a bottle of pharmacy alcohol, and a towel. She came to them, and without a word, kneeled next to Drago and began to wash his face. Drago opened his eyes and smiled as though to say, I didn’t know life could be this good. Or perhaps, I did not know I was alive.
And Milka felt fortified, too, with the new knowledge that it was possible to survive almost anything. And as the NATO aircraft explosively penetrated the sound barrier above them, she was not startled; she wondered whether that was the sound of the wrath of God which might neither destroy them nor protect them, unlike the love of God, which came through the old woman, who did not seem to hear anything—she did not respond to words of thanks and questions about whether there were doctors on the block, but he
r knotty gray hands kept washing Drago’s tranquil face, hair, and neck, as though he were a baby.
59th Parallel
I waited for the A train around five in the afternoon, at Columbus Circle, comforted that it was Saturday, hence, no rush hour. You’d imagine that, in the wake of 9/11, New York City subways would be less crowded than usual, that at least the paranoiacs of the city (no doubt a large population, of which I might be considered a member) would not be in the subway, which seems like a target. For a month after the attack, I observed the multitude of bags every morning and wondered, What’s to guarantee there are no explosives here, no anthrax, no plague? The police who stand around the entrances with their billy clubs, chewing bubble gum, don’t actually check anybody going in. They are here not to prevent anything, but to act once a tragedy occurs, postmortem. Despite all the talk about limitations on freedom, you can still walk in, unchecked, unidentified—unlike in the old Yugoslavia, where I once lived, and where the police “randomly” checked passersby, demanding they produce their IDs. (This might be the case in the United States soon, which should make us feel much safer—or much more threatened, depending on which line of thought you take.) Anyway, for a month I imagined explosions and choking smoke, but now such thoughts hardly cross my mind. What crosses my mind instead is that such thoughts don’t. Strangely, there is a sensation (perhaps thoughtless, perhaps thoughtful) of safety here.
On Friday, the subway was so packed that you could see the backs of people flattened against the doors as you waited on the platform. I glanced over at an Asian man, thinking he would be as amused and exasperated by the sight as I was, but he didn’t respond to my attempt at eye contact. Well, I thought, in Tokyo, they even employ subway-pushers, to push people onto the train, so to him this must look normal. But after I had this thought, he burst out laughing and asked me, “You feel like getting in there?”
I mumbled a reply. I had moved on to pondering something I’d seen coming down the stairs from Fifty-seventh Street: an old man lying on the floor of the submezzanine. One of his legs was dangling down the stairs, the other stretched out in front, culminating in an old hiking boot whose sole was detached so that his filthy toes, with curling blue nails, protruded. His beard was gray-brown, so was his hair, so were his clothes, so was his grimy, unwashed skin. But his penis, which he was stroking slowly, was all white-pink and gleaming, the only part of him that looked young and clean. When he noticed me, he slowly packed away his penis and coiled his body sideways to sleep. Who knows from where he drew his inspiration? There must have been a mind in there to form images, or maybe he did not need images.
And in the subway train just a day earlier, I’d seen a beggar who screamed, “People, I am starving! I need to eat. I ate garbage out of a Dumpster, got food poisoning, and they had to rip my stomach open. See?” He pulled his shirt up to show us an unhealed scar. People gasped. He reeked; incredibly filthy, bending, drooling. I gave him a dollar, but was careful not to touch him. Another man walked in wearing only underwear and socks, although it was the middle of the winter, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have nothing to wear. Please give me some money so I can buy a pair of pants.”
But somehow the homeless don’t go into the most crowded trains. Maybe they are squeamish about contact with the clean.
SATURDAY, I boarded the A train at Columbus Circle, relieved that it was Saturday, and hence no rush hour. Nothing seemed unusual, except that everything seemed totally normal and usual. I got on behind a redhead whose hair was flaming orange-red. Although I did not stare at her, her hair burned itself into my field of vision; you could see her while not looking at her. There were hardly any seats on the train, except for one between her and a big, hefty guy. He even breathed heavily. I dislike sitting between two people, because although your asses may not touch, your shoulders usually do, especially when the people are men.
Just that morning, I’d sat between two huge guys and had to lean forward because, had I sat up straight, I would have been squeezed like a tube of toothpaste. Eventually, I thought, The hell with it, and I did sit up straight, and though our shoulders were crushed together, none of us would relent.
But this is not the real macho game played on the subways. The really macho guys sit with their legs spread wide apart. The wider your spread, the more of an alpha male you are. You’re making a statement: I don’t give a shit about your ass. I am going to claim my space. I don’t give a shit if you rub your leg against mine. I am not a homophobe. That’s your deal, not mine. I am a real man, and I have my space, and nothing—I mean, nothing—will move me. You can rub your leg against mine if you dare, but I bet you won’t, because you aren’t as tough as I am. Usually, a guy who spreads his legs also lets his eyelids droop and leans his shoulders back in his seat.
That morning, though I resorted to a shoulder squash, I was not going to rub legs with those guys, so I crossed mine in a retreat of sorts. (Although now my foot was sticking too far out into the crowd, threatening to trip anybody passing by. But that was fine; this would be my form of rudeness.) When I crossed my legs, the guys sat up even straighter in psychological and sexual triumph: they were alphas, and I’d revealed myself as a beta simply by being squeamish. Squeamishness is a beta quality. Tough guys don’t mind touching legs; they don’t squirm. I sat between them like an intellectual who does not have much use for his body, not a prime male fucker who is proud to display his balls and now and then slides his pelvis forward with pride: the balls have got to swell, spread, pop merrily out into the world.
That morning’s ride fresh in my mind, I regarded the open middle seat with distaste, forgetting that the flaming redhead probably would not play leg games with me. She was not a guy (a big plus on the subway, from my point of view) and seemed slender. But the other seat was occupied by a guy, and a real space-hog at that. I looked at the seat and then down the train: Should I walk down to the next group of seats? Maybe I’d find something on the aisle, where I could face away from my neighbor. I know that does not sound particularly friendly, but why would I feel friendly in a crowd of strangers, on those awful, hard orange seats, which hurt your ass even more than your eyes? After months of grinding my sciatic nerve between my bones and that hard plastic, I sometimes lose sensation in my feet.
So I was about to give up on the empty seat, which was almost as orange as the redhead’s hair. I was not going to be squashed like that again today, not even to sit next to a pretty girl. And she was pretty, judging by the way she carried herself (I was trying not to stare), erect and yet at ease. She crossed her legs, and the crossing of her long, delicate legs caught my eye. I was turning away when I heard a voice:
“Would you like to sit down?”
She was addressing me, in a slight lisping accent. She had full, stung lips.
“Sure. Thank you.”
How considerate, I thought. Not that this was an invitation to conversation. She was reading a book of phrases, in French and English, I guessed. People love France. Let her go to France. C’est la vie. Why should I care? I used to travel a lot, study German and Russian, and what good has it done me? Maybe she was French and was actually studying English. I would not look. I didn’t want to be rude, or, rather, to be perceived as rude.
I was careful to hide the cover of my magazine from my neighbor. Not that I had any reason to think that she would glance over at my reading material; in fact, she seemed so ultracivilized that she didn’t need to be curious about her neighbors. She read her dictionary. I read about a Unesco grant, and about awards for the best novel for readers aged ten to twelve. Now, why ten to twelve? There is a huge difference between ten and twelve. When you are ten, you can enjoy Snow White. When you are twelve, you are too busy jerking off to care. Should I write a letter explaining that to the international body? No, fuck them.
I whipped out my magazine, Poets and Writers. I know, totally lame, but it’s all right for the subway in the evening, when I am particularly scatterbrained. Obviously, a dic
tionary would be even better. The redhead had chosen well. With a dictionary, I’d need to concentrate for only a few seconds at a time; why hadn’t I thought of that before? I’d read John Dos Passos in the subway the other day, and when I was leaving, I saw a man in a business suit reading a shaggy copy of Dos Passos’s 42nd Parallel. In the mornings, I read the New York Times, elbowing my neighbors unapologetically in a form of beta revenge. Why is the paper so large? There should be a narrow subway edition. Hell, if papers can have evening and morning editions, they could have subway editions. Of course, some people develop that amazing accordion technique, whereby they fold the pages vertically in half and manage to whip through the whole paper without bruising anybody. Now, they are the truly civilized, brilliant in every respect. I envy them, but I don’t entirely admire them, for I find something terribly fascist about that organization of body and space; I imagine that most of these people work as insurance actuaries and IRS agents.
I READ ON. The heavy man on my left got up and left. Although there was no longer any chance of body contact with the redhead, since she had a rather vertical and elongated style, I moved away from her, into the newly vacated seat. Now it was 125th Street, Harlem. More people than I expected got on. It occurred to me that someone might sit between us, and that I would prefer to be next to her for some reason. Or absence of reason. So, quickly, I slid back to my original seat and launched a conversation: “Are you planning to go to France?”
“No,” she replied simply and laconically. (You might think that no is always simple, but sometimes it’s not, so I say it now: her no sounded simple.) Her eyes were a very light hazel, but not green.
“You are learning French, though, aren’t you?”
“No, Italian. I like French, though.”
“Will you travel to Italy, then?”
Infidelities Page 17