“I don’t think so. I like Italian but not Italians, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“I hate talking to Italians. They are obnoxious and they give me a headache. Half an hour of talking with an Italian, and you might consider suicide or homicide.”
“Not in my experience,” I said. “By the way, are you Russian?”
“Yes.”
“I am Croatian. I speak some Russian. We could try speaking it.”
“You are a writer, yes?” she said, ignoring my offer.
“How did you know? Oh, the magazine, of course.” Though I had tried to hide the title, she must have read enough to figure it out, even though I never got the impression that she was looking over.
“What do you write about?” she asked.
“Half of my writing is about the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the other half is…well, I don’t know what it’s about, and I don’t really care.”
“Pardon? I didn’t catch what you said.”
“That’s all right. It was not particularly articulate.”
“So, what is your writing about?”
“Yugoslavia. Wars. Emigrants. Disappearing places.”
She closed her paperback dictionary and put it in her black purse.
“So, what’s your occupation?” I asked.
“I was just starting to work in real estate, but 9/11 wiped that out. There are more real estate agents than buyers in Manhattan now. I am a concierge at the Iroquois Hotel. Nothing to be proud of.”
“Oh, that’s on Forty-fourth Street.”
“How did you know? You are the first person ever to know the place.”
“There are lots of fancy hotels there. So, do you go to the Russian Vodka Room?” I asked.
“No way. That’s where the Russian losers hang out. They all come from Brooklyn and lie about what they do.”
“How about Uncle Vanya’s?”
“Horrible food.”
“And the Samovar?”
“Awful, just awful. That place is lost in time. They even have a white piano, and people weep when they sing World War II ditties.”
“You know, Baryshnikov owns the place, and the piano is his.”
“So? It might as well be at Brighton Beach, with all the misfits who want to feel they are still in Russia.”
“Where do you like to go?”
“I don’t like to go out. It’s enough that I have to spend so much time on this subway. What a nightmare.”
At that moment, a thin man in rags at the other end of the coach began wailing as though his entire family had just been wiped out. The more you listened to him, though, the more you realized that he was out of his mind. He was screaming and weeping, but also laughing softly in between his screams.
“I agree,” I said. “The A line is a total pain.”
Now she was preparing to get off. She wiggled in her seat and double-checked her leather purse, clicking it shut. Her fingers were amazingly long.
“Well, it was nice talking to you,” I said. “Maybe we could exchange emails?”
“I’ll see you on the A train.”
“Why do you say that?” I said, a little put off.
“Why would I not say that?”
“It’s a big city.”
“Not so big. We have already seen each other on the A train.”
“When? I don’t remember.”
“I used to be blonde. It was a mistake to color my hair red. It looks silly.”
“It looks all right to me. I don’t remember you as a blonde, though.”
“You looked right at me one day.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t? Trust me. You looked right at me. If you think about it a little, you will remember.”
Boy, is she comfortable, I thought. An American would never so calmly observe such a fact. She would either accuse you of it, or ignore it, or be triumphant about it. But this woman seemed merely factual and casual about it. And I thought, Does that mean that I am more memorable-looking than her? I doubt that. Apparently she has a better memory than I do. But she is making up excuses for me. Why? Maybe she’s vain and can’t believe someone wouldn’t remember her. No, it doesn’t seem like it. It’s just a fact she remembers. It has little to do with me; she remembers when people pay attention to her.
“I don’t remember,” I said. “But I’ll think about it.”
“It was a pleasure to meet you.” She stood up and offered me her hand and even curtsied a little. The homeless man at the other end of the coach howled louder.
Maybe I should stand up, I thought. But why should I? She does not want to exchange e-mails, and I am not into subtlety. Apparently not, if I ogled her. I did not remember ogling any pretty women on the A train. Overall, I tried not to pay attention to the damn crowds. I didn’t want to be a stupid lech. I was sure I had not seen her.
“Pleasure meeting you, too,” I said. “When did I see you before?”
“About six weeks ago. Good-bye.”
As soon as she left, I remembered. She was with a bearded man, and they talked about getting their real estate licenses. She said it was a must, that real estate was the way to go; there was so much money in it. She was dressed in a black skirt, a little above the knee, and her hair was blonde. Her full lips were vermilion, in stark contrast to her wan skin, and she had a graceful way of moving, like a former skater or ballerina. She seemed aware that I was looking at her. In fact, she looked back, but not brazenly, because she was also calm and seemed to communicate neither like nor dislike, irritation nor pleasure.
At one point, the man with the beard took her hand in his and clung to it. He hugged her, wrapping his arm completely around her. One of his fingers bore a broad gold ring. He was desperate to possess her, I could see, but he did not possess her. I knew then that she was aware of me. She should not have been aware of me while her boyfriend (I assumed he was a boyfriend, or perhaps even a fiancé) hugged her like that, with such fervor and happiness. But then I thought, No, she is not interested in me, nor in her boyfriend, for that matter. She is simply aware. And right then I thought what a misfortune it was that a conversation between me and her was totally impossible.
And now, miraculously, we had talked. She wasn’t too surprised that I did not remember her, though the certainty with which she said, “You looked right at me,” implied that I should have remembered. And now I did remember. I remembered how she’d walked onto the train, a little uncertainly, a little gingerly, like someone stepping onto ice. And when she modestly brought her knees together, as if to close herself in, it looked so elegant that I thought, She must be Russian. Americans don’t do things that consciously—or self-consciously. And then she cast a glance at me, held my gaze a moment. It was a conversation with no words spoken.
She had left the train now, but the door was still open. I could have rushed out to tell her that I remembered, but I didn’t need to. She’d already figured out that I would remember, and that we’d meet again.
Or maybe we won’t. Just the fact that my desire to have a conversation with her was fulfilled is enough. It does not need anything to follow it. It’s not much of a plot, but that’s fine; I don’t need plots. In a way, after 9/11, it’s nice not to have a plot, or big events; I’ve written so much about war and murder—and crime and sex, for that matter—that it’s a relief not to have any of that. The fleeting encounter was fine—finer, to be sure, than listening to that madman bellowing at the top of his lungs as though he were dying and his family were dead.
WHEN THE TRAIN reached my stop, the madman got off, too. I went home and opened the windows and heard him crying out in the street. His bellowing was so tiresome and wild that I could not concentrate on my Dos Passos book—a scene on a train in which a hobo struggles to sit up straight, fearing that he will cough to death if he lies down—so I closed the windows, even though this made the apartment too warm. What a loud, awful, obnoxious racket the m
an was making. Him I would remember; his cry I would recognize.
Ribs
On Saturdays the mail usually came around eleven in the morning. Starting at nine, Mira waited for it, drinking Turkish coffee and washing the dishes from the previous week; if it weren’t for the mail, she wasn’t sure her garret apartment would ever be clean. During the week, she taught high school history, which, with the new Croatian regime, she had had to relearn.
At quarter to eleven she walked down the dusty stairs, which were worn and indented in the middle even though they were made of thick oak boards. The lightbulb in the windowless stairway had burnt out and no tenants had bothered to replace it; nobody in the building seemed to know who the landlord was. The state had owned the building, but probably someone in the government had “privatized” it, not to look after it but to collect the rent.
No mail in the yellow box by the house gate with chipping gray lead paint. She looked out into the street: nobody in a gray uniform walking with his big leather bag—actually, no pedestrians at all. She peeked into the neighbors’ mailboxes; they were empty. So there was still hope for today’s mail, and even a bit of hope for what she was really waiting for: news about her husband, who had been drafted nearly a year before. She hadn’t heard anything from him in more than six months. He was not reported as MIA. She could get no information about him from the government offices.
When he was home, she didn’t enjoy his presence—they had been married for twenty years, and how wouldn’t she get bored with someone who didn’t like to read the same books, or even talk? Still, there was something terribly threatening in losing him, and in not knowing whether in fact she had lost him. Were they still a family? It was not up to them to decide, but up to the state, and probably not even the state, which wasn’t much in control in the drift of the wars in the Balkans. And so now and then she looked up at the framed black-and-white picture—Zarko, bald, with a thick black mustache and raised eyebrows that looked like slow accents,^^. His eyebrows made him look skeptical and disenchanted. Wistful. The eyebrows roofed large eyelids with purple veins. And what could he see better by raising the eyebrows? Why do people raise them? To correct farsightedness? She had not studied him much while they were together, but now she could not help it. He was a tram driver, and he had dreamed of becoming an independent painter, but he’d given up because he couldn’t sell paintings, and acrylics were too expensive. He didn’t like oils because, he claimed, they took too much time, and painting with them, with attention to timing and the order in which one applied the paints, resembled cooking too much. The picture on the wall was taken while he was still a tram driver and he had already given up his art. But the disenchantment couldn’t be explained so easily, in commercial terms—that would be too Marxist, she thought. He must have given up on image making because his eyes had failed to see something that they had yearned for; his mind had failed to capture whatever it had hoped, and that probing gaze perhaps expressed alarm at the emptying of his vision, at the dissolution of the things seen, observed, into a meaningless vastness. But there was something that perhaps grieved him more than his stalled art: an accident. One day when his tram had been pulling out of a stop, the doors, which closed automatically, caught a boy’s leg. Zarko did not see that. Perhaps he had been too abstracted to look in the rearview mirror. People screamed. He did not hear the screams in time. Perhaps he had been too self-absorbed or dreamy to realize that the screams were directed at him. So he did not notice that the boy, with his leg caught in the door, fell on the asphalt. The train dragged the boy’s body. By the time Zarko responded to the screams, the boy had fallen under the wheels, which crushed him. After that, Zarko quit driving trams and worked as a ticket salesperson at the international counter at the train station. Who knows, Mira thought as she sipped more of her muddy espresso, what he lived for. Why could he never express his longings, misgivings, sadness? And why can’t this country get any better coffee? On all her trips abroad, she found much better coffee—in Vienna, Milan, even Hungary. Why was Croatia and the former Yugoslavia in general bent on importing the worst, stalest coffee in the world? Perhaps it wasn’t stale upon arrival, but stayed in storage places for months.
She drank her third cup of espresso, or depresso, and walked down. There was one blue envelope, from the ministry of defense, but it was addressed to her son, not to her. She opened it.
Pero, her nineteen-year-old, was just barely getting up. He had stayed out late; although he didn’t have any money, he frequented bars and cafés. It seemed most young people spent their time sitting in the tiny jittery chairs of cafés all over Zagreb. Terrible lifestyle, but there were no jobs and the universities were in disarray—during the war, the brain drain had intensified: many of the Serbian faculty were sacked, and many, Croats and Serbs alike, had gone abroad. The replacements weren’t always qualified; they got jobs through political contacts and temporary political correctness, which, at the time, was nationalism. So the quality of education fell sharply, and Pero claimed there was no point in studying anything. Mira loved her son, but she hated his sloth and his lifestyle. She wished him to work as a laborer or anything for a year, simply to work, not to lounge around watching bad TV and reading American books in awful translations.
Pero was up, stumbling around the sink and squeezing an empty toothpaste tube.
You know what this means? she asked Pero, who was baring his large teeth in front of the mirror.
He read the notice.
Sure, they’ll probably want me to go to Bosnia to fight in the idiotic war.
That’s right.
Shit, I’m not going.
How do you think you’ll accomplish that?
I’ll run away, abroad.
But your passport’s expired, and you can’t get a new one without a release from the army. And what would you do abroad?
Maybe I can walk across the border at night. Nobody guards their borders the way they used to.
He spat white toothpaste into the sink and forgot to wipe his mouth, so although his face was red from anger, his lips were white, like a clown’s.
Mira’s cousin, who was a physician, wrote a note to the effect that Pero suffered from hypertension, 200 over100, but the recruitment office director, according to Pero, said, We could send you to a hospital for a week and check out your condition to see whether you are malingering, but that would waste everybody’s time. So what if you had hypertension? If Serbs and Muslims invade Zagreb, wouldn’t you still have to defend yourself? And so what are you going to do? Die of a heart attack? Come on, you look pretty healthy to me. Who gives a shit if you have high blood pressure. You’ll have it at home, too. Walking in the woods will do you some good. Go home, get your underwear, and off we go, in three days.
And Pero did go home, with a bottle of brandy.
Mira was beside herself. Wasn’t it enough that she’d lost her husband? For what? For some kind of fake country, which served as a pretext for a few robbers to get rich while everybody else got poorer?
How would she live if she lost her son? What would she do? Write letters? Go again to Mothers Against War and shout? She had done that; she had protested with Mothers Against War because they were the best-organized protesters, a group of several hundred women who marched peacefully in Zagreb, Osijek, Rijeka, and several other towns in Croatia. On one occasion, she took trains through Hungary to Serbia with several other mothers and joined a similar Serbian organization. Together the two groups gathered in front of Savezna Skupstina (the parliament), carrying enlarged pictures of their beloved sons and daughters, for there were daughters in the war as well. They threatened to storm the parliament, but the police stopped them—not by force, but by informing them that nobody was in. The politicians were all watching the soccer match, Zvezda vs. Dinamo Kiev. And Milosevic never came to the parliament anyhow. The cops said, Your best hope is to get attention from the camera crews so they’ll broadcast your protest on the news, or get journalists interested so t
hey will put your pictures in the papers. And as the mothers stood, ignored by the media and politicians, they talked about their children and husbands in the war, and soon Serbian mothers started blaming Croatia, and Croat mothers Serbia, and the peace-loving gathering ended in fistfights. Mira got a black eye in the brawl. If it hadn’t been for the police, the brawl would have been much worse for the outnumbered Croatian mothers. They ran down the steep cobbled streets, twisting their ankles, to the train station, and crammed into a couple of compartments with a few quiet soldiers who were on the way to Novi Sad. The soldiers were courteous, offering them homemade poppy-seed strudels, and it was hard to imagine that they might be drafted murderers on vacation.
No, she was not going to join Mothers Against War again. She took a tram to the recruitment center and asked to speak to the director. He was too busy to see her. She waited till the end of the shift and followed him out to his black BMW. He went alone, unescorted—pretty remarkable, she thought.
Excuse me, sir, could I talk with you for a second about my son, Pero Ivicic?
Why, everybody wants to talk with me about sons!
But he has high blood pressure, couldn’t you let him stay home?
That is not my job. If the recruiters said he must go, he must go.
How much money should I give you to change that?
You want me to go through the records stealthily, to take his out? That’s awkward. I am not bribable.
Are you serious? I thought everybody took bribes.
How much are we talking here? he asked while he unlocked the door with a beeper remote.
Eight hundred marks.
He scoffed. At this rate, you may indeed arouse my sympathy.
I don’t have any more money. My son is all I have. My husband hasn’t come back from central Bosnia. Perhaps you could find out about him?
That’s not my job.
What is your job?
He laughed. I could let my colleague who deals with stuff like that look into it. Anyway, what was his name?
Infidelities Page 18