Is, I hope. Zarko Ivicic.
Zarko Ivicic?
Please, do have someone let me know where my husband is.
But about your son, I can’t do anything. We need soldiers; we don’t have enough to cover all the fronts. You know what our country looks like, like a banana, with borders everywhere and territory nowhere. That’s all we have, borders, impossible to cover.
He took a look at her. What is your son’s name? Sorry, I am no good with names, it takes two, three times before I can remember them. And your name?
Mira Ivicic is mine. Pero is my son’s.
And Zarko Ivicic? He sighed. Okay, I will remember.
He again took a look at her, up and down, as if to determine her proportions, and he said, If you’d like to talk more, let’s have a cup of coffee at Gradska Kavana.
The Kavana was an old establishment in the center of the city, with marble floors, high ceilings, and newspapers on sticks, which tremulous old men with yellow fingers and white hairs read slowly, their blue lips moving asymmetrically. Crimson velvet curtains hung in round vertical waves over the windows, and even where they did not cover the windows, no light came in from outside. The low awnings blocked the sunlight, and inside the lightbulbs, imitating candles in chandeliers on wheels, dissipated only a feeble orange light from up high.
They sat in a corner and a waiter in the traditional white-and-black outfit came over.
Mira put her hands on the marble surface of the table and was struck by how chilly it felt.
Two cappuccinos, the director said.
She was already wired enough from her morning coffee and the alarming news, so she knew the cappuccinos would be overkill.
She trembled from so much coffee and fear, and now the uncertainty of what would be said. The stern man was handsome in a rough way—his five o’clock shadow made his protruding chin and the space above his upper lip blue. And with his somewhat graying hair and blue eyes, and the blue smoke that enveloped him, he was thoroughly blue. She wondered whether his blue jacket and blue shirt lent their color to his eyes and hair. When she picked up her glass of water, her hand shook, and the water rippled and almost spilled over. She clutched the glass with both of her hands to drink. She had not been with a man in a year, and there was something disarmingly erotic in the uncertainty and the threat that this man posed. The fact that the erotic sensation seemed trivial in the face of more important matters, such as her son’s freedom, only enhanced the vague but irrepressible flutter of her senses.
If you sleep with me, I’ll be nice to you, I’ll help you, the director said.
Why would you want to sleep with me?
Do you need to ask? I find you attractive.
If you want sex, you can easily find it. I can give you one thousand German marks—I think I could borrow two hundred—and for that you can have ten whores. I am not one of them.
I get offers of bribes all the time, so bribes don’t excite me. People offer me women.
Women are people.
Of course, of course. People offer sex, too. But that’s different. I am picky.
Should I be flattered?
I’d say so.
To be treated like a whore?
Oh, don’t put it so roughly. As a beauty, a high-society girl, let’s say.
And you are the high society?
I am afraid so. He laughed. Anyway, I don’t mean that either. You could see me as a friend.
I don’t know whether I could trust you.
Of course you don’t know. Who can trust anybody these days?
She felt his shin sliding against her outer calf. His hairy legs above his sock tickled her naked skin.
Without thinking, she slapped him. The sound resounded and her palm brimmed with heat.
Feisty, aren’t we? he said. I like that. Fire! What sign are you?
The go-to-hell sign.
She stood up and left.
Hey, hey, he shouted after her, I was just being playful!
But as soon as she was several blocks away, she considered: what’s worse, her sleeping with a creep or her son’s getting killed in Bosnia? No-brainer. She’d perhaps have a pang of guilt and discomfort for the rest of her life whenever she thought of sleeping with the director, but at least both she and her son would have a good chance for a longer rest of their lives. And she could dispel the discomfort by thinking that her self-sacrifice saved her son, gave him a second birth…so she might even gladly remember how she had helped him. After several blocks, she turned and walked back to the Kavana, but the man was not there. She sat down nevertheless and ordered a glass of white wine.
When she got home, her son was awake. He was not going out. He sat at a drafting table and drew images of woodpeckers, something he loved to do whenever he was ill, as a child. And now he looked all miserable and sallow, his spine bent over the table.
Where were you? he asked her.
What do you mean, where was I?
You were gone so long…and I will be leaving soon.
That’s just it, I went to the military offices to see whether I could bribe them so you wouldn’t have to serve.
They are open this late? And?
Believe it or not, the draft director would not be bribed.
Incredible. How much did you offer?
A thousand marks.
But that’s too little. Offer five thousand.
Where would we get it?
SHE COULDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. She kept imagining the director. If he hadn’t approached her so crassly and blackmailed her with sex in exchange for her son’s freedom, she would have agreed to sleep with him. But this way, he degraded her, himself, and sex, and so it could only be a sordid event. Except that her son would be free. But the sex itself would be sordid and utilitarian. Was that a subtle distinction? What difference should it really make how he approached the subject?
She had been sensually awakened on many occasions—and some days continuously. The war and the occasional bombings, especially in the beginning, when she spent several months in Osijek in eastern Croatia, had suffused her with a sensation of thrill and weakness that affected her eros. The war had sunk the country into literal darkness, with power outages, and into savage energy, which she felt everywhere. In the streets people looked at one another aggressively; sometimes she felt almost naked in front of men’s gazes.
She dressed impeccably, and when her budget didn’t allow for the best new dresses, she made them herself. She walked to shop at the distant farmers’ market and to her work, a couple of kilometers away, so she stayed slim, and her motions displayed a certain ease and grace since she was used to moving, walking, working, but nothing she did was strenuous. In her midforties, she felt even better than in her twenties, and she noticed that men stared at her body.
In the other room, her son groaned in his sleep.
In the morning he looked thoroughly miserable. He was smoking. He had quit. Perhaps he had pretended to quit, and now the pretenses were down.
After breakfast, consisting of two eggs over fried onions, he vomited.
He had only two days left before his departure.
She called in sick to work; she taught in the afternoon. A teacher calling in sick—a fine example. But why shouldn’t she? She was underpaid. And she did feel thoroughly sick.
She called up the director.
So you changed your mind? Delighted.
Well, would two thousand marks do it?
No. No money, only us.
If we sleep together, who’s to say that you will be motivated afterward to do anything about the draft? What could I do in that case? You might lose interest in me after the first time, wait—don’t interrupt, I know men can be like that.
Inconceivable. Anyway, I can’t keep talking like this on the phone—my secretary is here, colleagues.
They met in the apartment of a friend of his in an old, crumbling yellow building which shook whenever trams passed. As they sat on the sofa and drank Riesl
ing, a small chunk of mortar from the ceiling fell on the coffee table.
Jesus Maria, she said, this building must be at least two hundred years old, and if it reacts like this whenever a tram passes by, I wonder how it manages to still be here.
Good question, he said, and drank more. It’s too bright here, he said, and drew the roller curtains that were on the outside of the window. One of them got stuck, and stood diagonally across.
Do you know, he said, you haven’t even asked me for my name?
Why would I? Don’t you think I would know it from the office directory?
Well, there I give only my initial and my last name. So what is my name?
True, she knew only his last name. Petrovic, she said.
No first name? That doesn’t matter to you? See, I take interest in you, ask you for your name, personal questions, and you don’t care. So who wants to exploit whom, you tell me?
You have a point, she said. But, you know, to me, you are just you. We don’t know anybody in common, we probably won’t either, so we don’t need names. It’s just I and you.
Not quite. Anyway, my name is Branko.
Oh, pleased to meet you. She ironically stretched her hand and held it limply in his. His felt hot and dry, and that meant that hers must have been clammy. Playfully, he brought her hand up to his lips.
They undressed. She emerged from her dress and, with a swing of her hips, shook it off and let it slide down her legs. The drop of the cloth created a motion of the air, which stroked her coldly. Her knees touched each other, and so did her ankles, and her hip stayed tilted. She thought she was perhaps unconsciously affecting a mermaid posture, but now she was self-conscious. The more the cool draft, obviously no longer from her skirt but from poor windows, touched her, the more she was aware of her skin, even her hairs. She hadn’t yielded to the American pressure to shave her legs. Coca-Cola could have us by the throat, NATO could blast the hell out of the region if it wanted, but Gillette and Sharon Stone would not get to her, would not possess her hairs and scrape her skin with blades. She had light brown hair, hardly visible, but certainly feelable—they were tiny feelers, antennae for the motion of air and skins. As far as she was concerned, they were an erogenous zone, an erogenous prezone, and to her mind, there was nothing more sensuous than the moment before two skins touch, when the hairs already have bent to the warmth of the oncoming skin. The warm air moves the hairs, a subtle force spreads through the coils, the cuticles, evolving electricity. The pretouch communication of skins should enter its own time, its own sphere of slowness: and if skins could stay at slightly less than an aroused-hair-length of distance for minutes, she could have a most fabulous excitement of the senses, transcending the erogenous zones, local and provincial orgasms; all her hairs would add up the microthrills into a gestalt, in which she would be more than the sum of her parts; she would be herself, in and out of her body, astrally projected, brought out to the surface and beyond it, but not divided from herself and the world.
But the moment was not this subtle, she remembered; she was in this position for her son, she was going to sacrifice the integrity of her bodily aura and self, but as she considered her senses, she was not sure there would be any sacrifice. She perhaps hated and feared the man in front of her, but that did not interfere with a nascent thrill. Through her fear of the man her senses were alarmed and aroused in a diffuse way. Once the fear failed to produce flight, it became a sexual breathlessness. Perhaps her mistrust of the man was an aphrodisiac.
He undressed too, and pulled down his red boxer shorts. His legs were muscular, with big calves and quads, clearly a soccer player’s legs, and his hairs were plentiful. Whether she liked him, whether she hated him, it didn’t matter; she yearned for a conflagration of the senses, muscles.
They approached each other, but there was no moment of electrical discharge from their skins, for they fell into a grasping embrace. She liked squeezing tightly against him, feeling her muscles press through his to the bone. Her breasts pressed into his ribs. His hands, emanating the aroma of sunny tobacco fields, roved; one clasped her thigh, another the back of her neck. They fell onto the bed.
He kept touching her, massaging her breasts and thighs, and yes, she enjoyed it, but she longed to be spread out, invaded, she wanted a momentary surrender, the thrill of losing control, of defeat, mutual defeat, but the man withdrew, sighed, and a blue cloud seemed to come out of his forehead although he was not smoking.
He looked humiliated, and she felt safe, and that safety disappointed her. The situation had become banal. No threat, no conflagration. And she worried about Pero—would this count?
I am not with it today, he said, hoarsely, without clearing his throat. My daughter is in the hospital, with pneumonia. I am worried and guilty.
How could it be your fault? And what are you doing here?
Not that it is. But you know—maybe I could have kept our house warmer. Maybe I should have been buying oranges. I forget these things, and so does my wife.
So what are you doing with me?
Good question. You know, I wanted it, I thought about it, and I still want you, but the timing is bad. Sorry, he said.
You don’t have to be. Why would you be? This still counts, doesn’t it? You will let my son off the hook, won’t you?
She was confused. Here, this man presented himself as a bully and exploiter, and then not only couldn’t get it up but turned out to be a worried family man. Perhaps he only wanted to talk with her. Maybe he needed the pretext of sexploitation just to talk.
He drank warm Riesling from a thin green bottle. Funny, I keep thinking of my childhood, I don’t know why, he said.
I don’t know either, she said.
Was yours happy?
Oh, please, of course it was happy. I was in a bucolic Zagorje village, surrounded by barefoot kids, lots of cats, dogs, ducks, horses, what more would you want? What do you want from childhood? To explain your current troubles? That’s passé even in psychotherapy. She wasn’t sure about that, but she felt like saying it, perhaps because she was not ready for soulful confessions and lives explained and disguised. Not now, anyway. What happened to the good old sex?
For my part, the director said, I think childhood matters, if it’s an unhappy one. I grew up in Stuttgart, on a hill, near an American military hospital, in a wet dark gray building, and my father was a Gastarbeiter, a mason. He hated his work. He was damaged anyway, from the Second World War, because he was in the Croatian army when the war ended and he spent a year in Communist prison camps. His weight went down to half of his previous weight, he was skin and bones when he jumped off the train and fled to Italy. He was damaged, full of anger, and he made sure not to be alone in that. Every night he got drunk and beat my mother, me, and my brother, with fists, shoes…. And I still felt sorry for him when he died. Fell off the building and broke his neck. Strange, after him, my mother went through a transformation. Her nerves were damaged, of course, and now it was she who beat us every night.
How lovely. And that drove you into work for the Croatian military?
Oh, please, it’s not that simple.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, next to her feet, while she lay back, leaning on two pillows, with her breasts exposed. She did not wish to cover them; the cool air felt good, and being naked in front of the man, even though they could not have sex, gave her a sensation of airiness. Perhaps it was even aggressive, to display her femininity to him, keeping his masculinity in question.
Actually, I lied, he said.
You made up your childhood traumas?
No, not that part, but the present. My daughter is all right. She is not ill. I don’t even have a daughter.
Why would you lie about something like that?
Good question. I don’t know. Maybe to justify myself. I mean, my lack of arousal.
There’s no need to justify. There’s always Viagra.
Hey, don’t put me down. I…this happened for the first time.
>
With his head bent down nearly to his knees, he formed a letter C which was threatening to become a zero. What a metamorphosis of a power figure, all because of a stalled erection, how ridiculous, she thought. In a way, in his bent position, if he got an erection, he would complete the circle for a zero. What’s in this for him? Strange what moves men, she thought. But now that he looked so vulnerable and sorrowful, he came to life for her as a man; he was not just a sex-driven bureaucrat who held the fate of her son in his power. She felt a momentary sympathy for him.
We can always give it another try, she said, and poked with her toes the side of his body, above his hip, near where his kidney should be.
He wiggled uncomfortably.
Just hours before, he had been playing cat and mouse with her, as the cat, and now he was becoming all mousy and she catty. She laughed.
Actually, he began, and withdrew even further to the very edge of the bed.
You aren’t interested at all? We can keep massaging, don’t worry about sex. That’s erotic and fun too.
No, I don’t mean that…you interest me. Sex interests me, believe me, unfortunately. But there’s something more urgent. I should have told you about it right away, but I didn’t know how, or whether I should, and actually just because I do like you, I can’t avoid telling you. I still probably shouldn’t tell you.
What? You are talking in circles. If there’s something to tell, go ahead. I can take it. What’s it about? You have some terrible VD? So we can go out and buy condoms. Thanks for being considerate.
Not that simple. It has to do with your husband. We were together, in the same company in Bosnia.
Is he alive? She jumped out of bed.
Branko Petrovic did not say anything.
Do you know whether he’s alive?
I’ll get to that point. I’ll tell you what I know.
She covered her breasts with her hands, and then the motion struck her as absurd. She let her arms hang limply.
We all, as members of the Croatian army in Bosnia, participated in the action in Stupni Do. You know about Stupni Do?
Who doesn’t? That’s pretty horrible! In that massacre?
Infidelities Page 19