Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  ■ ■ ■

  I met Zlatka on that day when DJ Scrap played at the Railroader’s. I wanted to see the concert; not so much because I craved “Balkan Drum & Bass,” but because I feared the loneliness that would almost certainly have skinned me to my shuddering, sad core had I stayed home that evening, alone with myself, with all my sober thoughts, and those moans from the apartment next door.

  Again there was no warm water. My hair had been greasy for days. I walked into the first hairdresser’s I ran into: this was actually just a big glass kiosk, leaning up against the Engineer—Society for Culture and the Arts. The salon was called Rin Tin Tin and it serviced both men and women at discount prices.

  Zlatka was alone in the salon. When I came in, she crushed her cigarette against the side of an ashtray and put down the magazine she was leafing through. “How can I help you?” she asked. The beauty of her face—prominent cheekbones and large, dark eyes, her nose and lips, eyebrows, bangs, chin—didn’t fit the Rin Tin Tin’s interior. In a nearby cabinet, which looked like someone had stolen it from a landfill, there were plastic boxes containing curlers, scissors, and shampoo; two little dried-up rose bouquets; a frame with the price list; and a photo of a laughing dog. Washed-out posters of women with puffed-up hairdos decorated the glass walls of the salon.

  I was embarrassed because my hair was dirty and I felt sorry for Zlatka’s fingers slowly making their way through my greasy curls under the stream of warm water.

  She told me my tips were cracked and needed to be trimmed. I told her to go ahead and do it; their prices were sensationally low anyhow.

  ■ ■ ■

  An early, gentle winter evening doesn’t mean much at the Railroader’s: the light of day doesn’t make its way through the windows darkened by painted canvases; the booths always feel like they’re deep inside some catacombs. I twirled a lock of my hair, shiny and squeaky from washing, around my finger and let the waitress pour mulled wine from a large pot into my cup; she did it using a ladle, as though it was soup. Behind my back, DJ Scrap was pushing a metal box from one end of a small stage to another, dragging the cables that came along with the box, and every now and then stopping by the microphone, tapping it lightly, and saying, “Check, check, one-two, one-two.”

  Someone was throwing a birthday party; drinks started flowing faster, the atmosphere loosened slowly, talk became witty. Someone complimented me on my hairdo; it was strange to take a compliment, maybe I even blushed a little. Time rushed ahead like first love: the next time I looked behind my back, the club was already full to the brim, strobe lights pierced the darkness, and the voice of DJ Scrap, who had finally arranged all his props around the stage, took hold of the microphone confidently and released a salvo of loud kisses at the crowd. He promised them in a thick Serbian accent, “Tonight, we party!” and this made the front rows scream like they were getting bikini waxes. And when the too-loud music started, the grunting of the DJ’s fans got all the more intense, and gyrating limbs were suddenly scattered all over the dance floor. Soon the Railroader’s ventilation problem again made itself obvious: the fervor of DJ Scrap’s admirers, condensed into drops of sweat, gathered on the ceiling and slimed down the windows.

  I downed yet another shot that someone, when I wasn’t looking, had placed in front of me.

  She sprung out of the crowd and elbowed her way next to me at the bar. She waved at the waitress with a crumbled bill and yelled in a raspy voice, “A beer! Large!” I recognized her immediately, though she didn’t look the same as she had earlier that afternoon: wild hair, her mascara beautifully smeared under her eyes. I couldn’t take my own eyes off of her.

  “Hey, ciao!” I howled in greeting, trying to outshout the noise. She stared at me as though she was nearsighted, but that lasted only a second; the next moment she was offering me a wide smile, leaning toward me, and in a cracked voice asking what I was drinking. I pointed at the steaming caldron and she got me a cup of mulled wine and sat next to me. “You’re alone?” she asked, and that was enough to start with, to fill the silence with trivialities. She was alone; she’d come to the concert straight from work. She didn’t care much about DJ Scrap, had never heard any of his songs, she only felt like going out. She told me that there had been a competition on the radio and that she had made the call, given the wrong answer to the trivia question, but had won two tickets anyhow. She couldn’t get anyone to come out with her, because it was the middle of the week, her friends had children, worked, didn’t feel like it . . . she had almost given up. Still, she was glad she was here. By the way, her name was Zlatka. “That’s such a nice name,” I said, and it sounded sweeter than I wanted.

  Some awful guy in a leather jacket approached us when the fuse blew. There must have been a short circuit or something, the lights went out, the music stopped, the crowd got restless. The problem was solved in a couple of minutes, Scrap screamed into the microphone a little, fondled with his cables, and as soon as he got his bearings, again cranked up the volume to the max. Whipped by strobe lights, the dancers screamed gratefully.

  The guy in the leather jacket, as soon as the power came back again, leaned over us; he wanted badly to stand at the bar right between Zlatka and me. He wanted to catch us by surprise; he came up from behind and put his arms around us as if wanting to share his deepest thoughts and fears. I took my drink and stepped away. I expected Zlatka to do the same.

  But Zlatka didn’t move. She let him sit next to her, on my stool, and she even moved closer to him. The greasy leather jacket was screening her from me. Still, I could see her smiling flirtatiously, enjoying his flattery. A sluggish wave of disappointment washed out the fascination I had until a moment ago felt with my new hairdresser.

  Standing alone behind her back, I felt rejected and insecure. I approached the edge of the dance floor and danced a bit with my drink, then I downed it to get it out of my way and let the crowd suck me in. In a moment I was jumping all over the place and screaming into my clenched fist meaningless chunks of verse that kept repeating into infinity, like a skipping CD.

  My bangs soon went limp from moisture, the heat felt like a heart attack. At just the right moment, pushing away the young shirtless dancers in front of her, Zlatka appeared in front of me with a smile on her face and two pints of beer in her hands.

  “The DJ rocks!” she yelled into my ear and started coiling around me like a snake in some sort of a parody of a dance. It made me laugh. She swung her hair as though she were at a death metal concert, flexed her neck to the rhythm of the music, and at the end of every song screamed so hard that the veins on her neck popped up and her cheeks turned red. Everything was good again, all at once, as if that guy had never come around.

  The people around us were just a moving background, extras in a movie starring Zlatka and me. I got carried away. At moments I felt a sort of joy, thick and saturated, clotting in me, somewhere in my lungs, in my esophagus—I had to open my mouth wide and yell into the noise, anything, just to let it, this something, come out. When some bouncy song started playing, the half-naked boys started jumping all over the place and shoved Zlatka and me together. I grabbed her forearm, slippery from sweat. Then she kissed me on the cheek, just for the hell of it. I felt absolute delight, so much that I was ashamed. She was smiling.

  After the concert the crowd dispersed toward the bathroom and the bar. The dive’s regular musical repertoire was now being piped in, so we stayed at the dance floor and danced a bit more and kicked around plastic cups with our feet.

  “I hate it when the party’s over,” Zlatka said dejectedly. She was slurring. “I sober up immediately in horror when they turn off the music and switch on the lights. And when I see these bottles and cups all over the place . . . it’s like the apocalypse.”

  I couldn’t agree more. Everything is somehow more bearable in the dark.

  When we got out, our bodies steamed. The cold force
d us to huddle our necks in our shoulders like turkeys. We stood at the door and watched the darkness around us. In the distance, down the tracks, the train station glowed.

  “What do you wanna do now?” she asked. I didn’t feel like going home. The very thought that this night, so opulent and alive, could wither in the loneliness of my cold hole, on that limp red futon, to the tune of the muffled squealing of the water heater, made me draw my neck into my shoulders even more. And I couldn’t even imagine taking Zlatka there. “Okay, let’s go to my place,” she said as if she could read my mind. She jangled her keys and pointed at an old, white Yugo parked at the entrance to the dive.

  ■ ■ ■

  We took our time jumping on each other, we played the game of delayed pleasure, which—it was clear the moment we had gotten in the car, the moment we had stepped into the elevator—was as imminent as sobering up.

  Her apartment was on the eighth floor of a skyscraper in Sopot, a shady part of Novi Zagreb.

  “It may be small, but the welcome is big!” Zlatka echoed the slogan for Daewoo Tico, the smallest of small cars, as she let me in.

  The hallway was also a kitchen; further in there was a larger room whose glass wall separated it from a narrow balcony with a concrete railing. We had to be quiet not to wake up Mila; the little girl slept in the other room. Framed photos of Zlatka and her daughter smiled from bookshelves. Not taking off my coat, I stepped out onto the balcony to get some fresh air. I felt a little dizzy; the vista of concrete lumps wobbled in front of me as gently as feather grass. Deep down below my feet Dubrovnik Avenue was cramped. The cars rushed maniacally through the traffic lights trying to catch the green. Behind me, back in the apartment, Zlatka put on a CD with covers of ’60s hits.

  “Why can’t I stop and tell myself I’m wrong, I’m wrong, so wrong,” softly sang some woman, possibly black? Zlatka came up to me and occupied her own piece of railing.

  “See that skyscraper,” she pointed her chin toward the building separated from ours by a plateau the size of a basketball court. “Some woman fell from her balcony yesterday, from the eighth floor, just like this one, across the way. She leaned over and fell,” she said and stared down into the darkness. “I keep thinking about it. I wonder if she did it on purpose. I mean, these balcony railings are quite high, you can’t just fall over by accident.”

  I lowered my eyes, looking into the abyss below. I imagined police and a forensic team crowding around a fat housewife’s corpse and a huge bloody stain remaining on the pavement after the investigation.

  “This morning I met a neighbor in the elevator and she told me a lot of the tenants didn’t go to work yesterday so that they could see what was going on. They stood on their balconies like they were in a stadium somewhere, they spent the whole afternoon like that. Primitive bastards, see what people here are like?”

  “Eh, it’s the same everywhere,” I said.

  Down on the avenue a car ran a red light.

  ■ ■ ■

  She offered me her toothbrush. I showered with her shower gel, I put her lotion on my body, and used her makeup remover and cotton pads to take off my makeup. When I was done, she tossed me a pink Mickey Mouse T-shirt. We opened the couch, put on the sheets, and turned off the light.

  I started it. It was so natural to reach for Zlatka’s breasts: it seemed they were shaped to fit the mold of my palms. My breasts are round in a perfectly normal kind of way; they’re actually uninteresting. But hers are small, pyramid-shaped, and soft. I held them, my eyes closed, not breathing, until her hardened nipples pressed against my palm. I kissed them gently, as if kissing someone I love because they’re unavailable to me. She held me tighter: I was hers. Her approval filled me with joy; I wanted to please her, as though she were some mythical goddess. I kissed her neck and slipped under the sheet like a worm under tree bark. I took off her panties. I paid attention to every movement of my head, to every twitch; I listened carefully to her breathing. She moaned. Just a quick touch of a soft curve of my tongue on her clitoris. She moaned again. Spread her legs wider, twisted and threw her head back.

  ■ ■ ■

  It’s morning, the blinds are up, the room is filled with light, and by my side Zlatka is still snoring like a man.

  The first thing I see when I free myself from her embrace is the smiling face of a little girl maybe ten years old. Her brown hair reaches her shoulders, she kneels in front of me, and her sleepy eyes are so close to mine that I imagine that only a moment ago she must have kissed me or smelled me, like a dog. Then I realize this is Mila, she’s already up, clanging cups in the kitchen, letting the water run in the sink, opening the cupboards.

  “What kind of tea do you like?” she asks me as she materializes again. Embarrassed, I sit up in the bed and immediately pain invades my temples. I feel stupid in a wrinkled T-shirt with Mickey Mouse printed on it.

  “Mint,” I say in a voice that sounds squeaky and hoarse this morning. I’m confused and slow. I smile anxiously at Mila who, completely relaxed, begins to chatter away about having an early music class, about her listening quiz, which consists of the teacher playing a CD with parts of different compositions, for example of Mozart or Beethoven, which the students then have to identify on paper, Requiem or Pathétique. Her cheerfulness has a soothing effect on my sense of not belonging. It makes me feel soft.

  Mila puts the tea on the nightstand by my side of the bed and then shakes Zlatka’s forearm. “C’mon, Mom! I have an early class!” And then she goes to the bathroom. Zlatka slowly opens her eyes; when she sees me, her face gathers into a lazy smile and then she again buries her head in the pillow.

  “An early class,” she says and sighs, trying to get out of bed. When she realizes she’s completely naked under the comforter, she wraps herself in it like a caterpillar. Without a word I lean toward the armchair and reach for the stretched-out T-shirt she removed so resolutely last night and threw into the darkness of the room.

  We have cereal with yogurt for breakfast. A squirrel hunching over a large walnut like a fortune-teller over her crystal ball smiles at us from the cereal box. Zlatka and I share our hangover in silence, but that doesn’t make it any more bearable. Only Mila seems genuinely happy: she talks about school, lists her favorite courses, and brags about her midterm grades.

  In front of the building, we get into Zlatka’s Yugo. She’ll take Mila to school, drop me off at home, and then go to work.

  The school is nearby. During the short drive over wet streets of Novi Zagreb I see a lot of right angles, heavy traffic, a few traffic lights, a tramline behind a neglected hedge. In a few minutes we’re in front of a playground in which a couple of boys are hanging around the basketball court with a ball in their hands. Despite the cold, they’ve taken off their jackets and are jumping at each other excitedly, yelling. Mila adjusts her scarf and kisses Zlatka on the cheek; in return, Zlatka then kisses her on the forehead. “What a smart little forehead,” she says. I say, “Good luck with your listening quiz!” Mila says, “Thanks!” and leaves. We watch her as she runs toward a group of smiling girls with a huge checkered bag on her back; one of the girls waves at her in a wide arc, like the guy at the airport who signals the planes. They fall into each other’s arms with so much force that Mila’s hair sticking out under her woolen hat shakes vigorously.

  “They sit together in class,” Zlatka says, then puts the car in gear and we move slowly on.

  The rest of our drive is more or less horrible. We feel Mila’s absence and have nothing to replace it with. As if everything that happened last night happened to someone else. On the bridge, the line of cars moves more and more slowly. The drive downtown seems like an impenetrable eternity. “It’s always like this in the morning, every morning,” says Zlatka. “You simply can’t avoid it. I stopped worrying about it,” she says. Still, her fingers are restless on the wheel, and when she puts one on the gear
shift, there’s a moist trace left behind.

  I reach for the radio; I feel the need for a song, any song, to make the silence more bearable. Even the commercials for a weekend sale at Konzum Supermarket would do.

  “It doesn’t work,” says Zlatka and glances compassionately at the radio. “It died on me.”

  “But didn’t we listen to it last night, when we were driving to your place?”

  “That was in our heads.”

  We drive on in the tense silence. Zlatka adjusts the heat, plays with the gearshift, looks down the river the color of chocolate pudding. I watch the cars stranded on the bridge. Today, they are mostly red.

  She parks in front of Rin Tin Tin. I’ve told her she doesn’t have to drive me all the way home, that I live really nearby, “just around the corner.” Before we get out of the car, we sit there for a little while. We should say something; make our good-bye pleasant, normal. Still, we say nothing and everything is odd, unfinished, trembling from insecurity. Then, as if on cue, we reach for the doors at the same time, and get out. A smile, “Bye, see you!” and that’s it. After a few steps Zlatka reaches the hair salon and disappears behind the glass door and its sticker saying, “Push!”

  I’m left alone.

  ■ ■ ■

  Instead of going to my apartment, I head downtown, across the railway. At eight in the morning the city looks foreign enough that it almost seems it might be possible to get lost in it. I can’t remember the last time I was up this early. Everything is so interesting: teenagers with their doodle-covered backpacks and bloated, warm jackets running to catch the tram; women and men with circles under their eyes marching toward escalators and gluing their sluggish eyes to the newspaper in the hands of the fat news vendor waving around his wares and yelling out the headlines. A bit farther, retirees come out of the crowded tram carrying canvas bags. Everywhere, the smell of coffee.