The doctor came the next day, the fever hadn’t gone down, he listened to Nešo’s heart and looked him long in the eye. I don’t know, he said, we’re going to have to run some tests. Later his mother brought him some chicken soup. The soup had the taste of illness; Nešo will remember it, and more than anything else the soup will remind him of 1967, the year he was supposed to have died. Its comforting mild taste will irritate him and sometimes induce rage; how is one to understand healthy people eating chicken soup, eyeing each other empathetically, like they belong to a society of local pedophiles who meet once a week around a pot of dead naked birds, all gleaming white.
The waiting room at the clinic was full. Nešo and his father got the only two free chairs left. It was to be the last stroke of luck for the next six months. Everything that happened next would be a long mute nightmare.
The nurse came by and gathered the health-insurance booklets. Hours went by, Nešo closed his eyes and dozed; every now and then he fell forward in his sleep, his father catching his shoulders. I’m not in any pain, he told the doctor, who sat behind a big black desk. Sit yourself down, the nurse came over, the bed covered in a green rubber sheet; she set a rubber tape around Nešo’s upper arm and tapped him on the veins with two fingers; everything looked like it was made out of rubber, the doctor not getting up from his chair; the jab was unpleasant, dark blood flowed, Nešo took a look and his head began to spin, he thought he was going to tip over onto his back and the needle stay sticking in his veins.
The results weren’t ready for another three days. His temperature stayed up around 100.4 degrees. His father went to collect the results and returned ashen-faced. Everything’s fine, he said to Nešo. That night his father and mother sat in the kitchen, smoking in silence until the morning. The results showed their son had leukemia and only a few months to live.
For days he looked at his ashen father and his mother’s swollen eyes. Am I dying here? he asked the doctor. You don’t die when you’re nineteen, he lied. Once a week the nurse came and took Nešo’s blood. Now he would look at the ceiling. He had learned his lesson. Accustomed to his sickness and the muddle in his head lasting the whole day through, his temperature never below 99.5, already he had a score of experience. Nature has seen to it that those suffering from serious illness have no fear of death, he thought, believing that when the moment came he would greet it with serene indifference.
And then, after three months, the fever disappeared. He still felt weak, and his blood count was catastrophic, but his mind had completely cleared, his appetite had returned, and with it all those human fears, not least the fear of death. His father’s face retained its ashen hue, but his mother had stopped crying, the red gone from her eyes. To her, that Nešo’s temperature had dropped was more important and far stronger than the word leukemia. She thought that sometimes you shouldn’t put too much stock in obvious truths, results, and diagnoses, it was better to just outrun them, behave like everything was normal and everyone happy, and then at a given moment everything would indeed be normal again, and besides, happiness comes of its own accord, when no one expects it but everyone is ready to welcome it with open hearts.
When the weakness began to recede from his muscles and bones, Nešo got up out of bed. Is he allowed to walk, his father asked the doctor. He can if he’s able. It was another Sunday, now in the early spring, when Nešo left the house for the first time. The news about his leukemia had spread all over town, everyone knew he was going to die; friends smiled at him overenthusiastically, their girlfriends hugging him, hugs that made their skin crawl, as if their hugs were comforting death itself. Nešo sat down on a bench and watched the match with the girls. In a few weeks you’ll be playing too, he heard them say. They were lying, and he felt like a fraud. It was a feeling he would never forget and that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He knew he wasn’t going to die, but he couldn’t tell anyone. They knew he was going to die, but they couldn’t tell him. They could only sit there in silence, smiling at each other, people on different sides of the same wall: them, beauties in a sun-baked city, and him, a dead man walking, whom you hung out with out of a particular sense of social obligation. Not knowing it, they tried to buy their own deaths from Nešo.
At the beginning of summer, sitting again behind the big black desk, the doctor said to his father: it wasn’t leukemia. We don’t know what it was. The main thing is that your son is healthy now. His father ran out of the doctor’s office as if he had lost his head, as happy as a man whom they had told nothing else bad would ever happen to him in life. Nešo played soccer again.
Twenty-five years later, on Sunday, March 30, 1992, he invited a couple of friends and their wives over for fish and hot-pepper stew. Outside the war was about to fire up, inside the smell of fish, hot peppers, and tomato filled the air. No one wanted silence that day; let’s just talk about everything, except the war; we’ll forget about that, pretend it’s not here, like patients with a sudden interest in astronomy and linguistics, in everything they ever overlooked in life, now beautiful because it doesn’t remind them of their illness. The men laughed, the women planned their summer vacations, nonstop they spoke the names of days and months to come as if doing so would obliterate the war, that the tanks would cease to exist the second their steel ears heard the women’s voices, imposing and insistent, giving the order that August is for going to the seaside. Their stories annoyed Nešo, as he was the only one with no need of them. The war hadn’t registered in his head or heart; he was going steady with Magda, and this was all that held his interest and was the only reason he had invited guests over for lunch. He was just biding his time to cut loose. I killed a carp this morning, he said, it was no easy thing, I had to really stick it to him. Thank Christ pike and perch are always dead. The women fell silent and looked down at their plates. They took Nešo’s story about dead fish as an insult, as if he were saying to them: Yeah, you’re scared of the war, you should be ashamed, you don’t want to admit to yourselves that maybe you’ll never go to the seaside again, that maybe tomorrow your men will be holding machine guns in some ditch somewhere, pissing their drawers out of blind fear. They didn’t like Nešo, and that’s why they hadn’t worked out that the war hadn’t yet reached him, and they didn’t like him because Nešo loved playing the he-man, the kind who didn’t wash the dishes and didn’t iron his shirts because these kinds of chores were invented solely for husbands to humiliate their wives. Magda couldn’t care less; she smiled and calmly ate her food. He couldn’t stand that; it was for her that he was playing the he-man. Though they’d been married for years, Magda loved him as much as he did her, and admired him to an extent that would have made any husband happy. But Nešo wouldn’t quit, whenever someone came around, or as soon as he met someone at the bar, he couldn’t overcome this obsessive need to start talking the kind of shit that would make the stomach of any woman within earshot churn; any woman except Magda. She was either completely indifferent or accepted what he said as something definitive, which one needn’t pay any mind, much less fight about. Nešo’s were just words without substance, and it had never crossed his mind to try and put them into practice.
My wife always cleaned my soccer cleats after a game, she’d clean them and I’d lie down for a snooze. That’s the way things should be. He peered over at Magda, happily slurping his stew, flushed from the hot peppers and a kind of internal warmth that washed over him every time Magda sent apologetic glances to the women at the table. Magda didn’t give a thought to revealing that she’d never even laid eyes on those damn cleats, because then she’d ruin their game, and the game was more important to her than Nešo’s friends and their wives, who were as wild as two lynxes, kicking their husbands under the table. At the door, one of them, Nataša, said we’re never coming here again! Her husband bit his tongue; showing your anger like this was bad form. Nešo was his friend, and besides, he had a different take on the story about the cleats. It’s just what people are like: They court their lovers i
n all kinds of ways, and Nešo courted his with chauvinistic he-man stories.
But Nataša was right about one thing: They never came over to the apartment again because soon the apartment was no more. It went up in flames in one of the first bombardments of the city. Friendships got caught in the flames too, the remnants rare late-night telephone conversations, unreliable snippets of news traversing seas and oceans, news that contained but one verifiable fact: Everyone who had eaten fish and hot-pepper stew at Nešo’s that last Sunday before the war was still alive. Once they had lived within a forty-five-minute tram ride of each other, but today, even the fastest supersonic jet couldn’t round them up in that time.
Nešo lived with Magda in Toronto. He worked for an Italian in a little place that made spaghetti and fanatically tried to make new friends. He wanted people whom he could show himself and Magda off to, for someone in the big wide world to notice and say, look, those two are together; he wanted their love recorded the way it was in some of those burned books in their abandoned city. If you’ve already lost your life, at least you don’t have to lose your love, he thought, huddling down under the duvet, gripping Magda’s ankles with his feet, and speaking words that he later claimed he couldn’t remember because as Nešo would have it, you only uttered true words of love in your sleep. One Sunday he invited three work colleagues and their wives over for fish and hot-pepper stew. They were taken aback by the invitation but accepted it all the same. Having lunch at someone else’s place seemed a good way to save some money, and they had the feeling Nešo was inviting them to a kind of exotic ritual from some distant land, a ritual one really had to experience for oneself, like going off on a package tour somewhere.
A pack of deep-frozen fillets didn’t exactly amount to fish and hot-pepper stew, but Nešo didn’t care. He tried the steaming broth, huffing and puffing, slurping up his noodles, oblivious to Magda clinking her spoon on the edge of her plate in admonishment. She frowned, her heart pounding like crazy; God, just as long as he doesn’t start, just as long as he doesn’t speak, she thought. The women were eating quietly and smiling broadly, the men chatting away, Nešo lying in wait for his moment. Magda said Nešo! . . . What? He looked up, she shook her head, don’t! . . . What don’t? . . . Don’t, please . . . What? . . . Don’t, just be quiet. The others fell silent; they didn’t understand the language but sensed it didn’t bode well.
Nešo put his spoon down, wiped his face and hands, and not taking his eyes off Magda for a second started with the story about his soccer cleats. Completely still, Magda returned his gaze, not paying the guests any mind. They ate, never looking up from their plates. The women raised their eyebrows pointedly, certain they would never be coming back here.
One of us has to go, said Magda. Why? . . . Because this life isn’t the same as the one where you could roll out your soccer-cleats story . . . Why isn’t it the same? . . . If you don’t know that yourself, I’m not telling you. I want you to go, or else I’ll go . . . Where would you go? . . . Nešo, I want you to go, and I want you to go right now . . . Where would I go? . . . I don’t know, you’re the he-man aren’t you?
She shouldn’t have said that; he went straight to their room, took a suitcase from the wardrobe, and half an hour later slammed the door behind him without saying goodbye. He didn’t think for a second where he was going, or even where he could go in a city in which he had no family, where friendships developed so slowly that there was no hope of a saving grace, of a bed even for just the night. He walked for a time, and then rested his suitcase on the sidewalk and sat down, making like he was waiting for someone. He was angry and hurt; he didn’t know what had just happened or where the exit was that might get him out of this story. He felt so awfully betrayed that his joints were going to jump out of their sockets, every bone racing in its own direction. Once he had been afraid of catching Magda with another man or that one day he would come home to a letter on the kitchen table, but those fears paled in significance compared to what had actually happened. Instead of just taking herself from him, Magda had taken everything he had left in his life. The how and why didn’t matter, nor the where and when; to him it seemed she had taken everything except the suitcase on which he had parked his rear. There was one thing he was sure of: He would never go back home, he would never knock on Magda’s door, and he would never see her again. Maybe Nešo would change his mind by the morning, but how and where to live until the morning? He thought about the friends he’d cheated when he didn’t die of leukemia: Sitting here on the suitcase was the price of that distant betrayal.
It was comforting that the news of what had happened to him would reach them, his sitting down on a suitcase in the middle of Toronto and waiting. Nešo couldn’t imagine what it might end up sounding like, but it gave him some release and he already felt a little better. He closed his eyes and wished that everything would come to pass as soon as possible and that he would find out from them what had happened.
A Little Joke
After A. P. Chekhov
Brane Konstantinović works in construction for a boss named Zeytinoglu. He hauls bags of cement on his back and sings two brothers born on the death wall, you wouldn’t believe your own eyes. The bricklayers and laborers, mainly Turks and Germans, think he’s a bit of a doofus because he sings while hauling cement, and always the same song, and always in a foreign language, but because he’s a hard worker and never complains, they like Brane. They don’t know anything about him, except that he’s a Bosnian and that he once studied architecture, but not everyone believes that one; there are those who doubt studying could turn so sour you’d end up hauling bags of cement.
Brane doesn’t work Sundays. Saturday night he trawls the precinct around the Hauptbahnhof, doing the rounds of the nudie bars, catching a peep show. For five German marks he watches the beautiful Emina who is now called Susanna, and he always meets someone he knows and they go to Serbez’s bistro for a beer. At half past one the girls stop by after their shifts, tall blond sex-shop assistants and gloomy Balkan pickpockets with permanently shot nerves. Brane thinks them all good people, and really they are, because at Serbez’s they never do anyone any harm, they never fight, they don’t even cuss like other people. In the wee hours they try to be like angels to each other, to make Serbez’s bistro a place they can transport themselves from the harshness of their lives back to the dreams of their childhoods. Every man and woman on earth can fall asleep like a child, but it’s not easy for a whore, or a pimp, to every day become a child.
Everyone needs Brane and a Saturday without him would be too much to bear, because he’s the only one who doesn’t belong to their world, he comes from someplace far away, from a life they all believe is better, one they all know about, though none have lived. But how can one not believe there is a life where mothers send their children to the store for bread and milk, where days begin with the morning and end with the evening, where postmen bring letters and packages, and where flags everyone believes in flap in the wind, just as one believes in the good fortune of others.
The story Brane tells for the tenth time is set in his former life. It’s one they have all already heard but request anyhow, translating it for each other into all the languages of their world: I’d always loved motorbikes. When I was seven my old man asked me what I wanted to be in life, and I told him a Kawasaki, what do you mean a Kawasaki, kid, his cigarette almost falling out of his mouth, easy, Dad, if there’s any way I can be, I’ll be a Kawasaki, and if I can’t, then I’m going to ride a Kawasaki. The old man said, fine, kid, so long as you’re happy and healthy, you can be a donkey for all I care. I bought my first bike in my first year of college, an ancient Bugatti, it didn’t last six months before falling apart. Then during the summer break I went to Germany for the first time, as if I knew it would one day have its payoff. I got a job in construction and earned the money for a good bike. It wasn’t a Kawasaki but a Honda; I drove it nights from one end of the city to the other, giving it hell, and I thought nothing
in life could ever be as great as sheer speed, nor anything ever more beautiful than when you become the wind, no longer a body or a soul, just pure air, like a storm wind on the sea. And there was this girl, Lejla, a wholesome blonde, barely eighteen, a normal kid from a good home, a kid who when she heads out the front door looks to you like a nurse who got lost down a mine and got herself all dirty, but she doesn’t see it because she doesn’t know anything about any kind of filth. So this Lejla girl says to me: oh, Brane, I’m so scared of motorbikes, I could never do that. I shrug my shoulders, and I’m like, fine, you shouldn’t then, who cares, and head on my way. But then she’s there again the next day, we talk about some stuff, and I ask her: so, Lejla, how’re things at school, and she says: they’re good, how else should they be, and I ask her if she’s doing her homework, and she says: yeah, of course, and even when I haven’t, I just pretend I have, and I tell her: lucky for you, Lejla, when I haven’t studied enough for an exam, it’s as if everything I don’t know is written on my forehead, and that’s the stuff the professor always asks me. That’s because you don’t know how to hide it, she says. How would I know when I’m always scared. But you’re not scared on a motorbike. No, I’m not, otherwise I wouldn’t ride one, I tell her. Then her again: oh, Brane, I’m so scared of motorbikes, I could never do that. And nothing. A week goes by, and there she is again, just after there’d been that earthquake in Montenegro. I say to her, those people jumping out their windows, nothing would have happened to them if they hadn’t jumped. I’m not scared of earthquakes, says Lejla. C’mon, how come you’re not scared of earthquakes, everyone’s scared of earthquakes, everyone normal. I’m not. I wouldn’t jump, but when I see you, my heart stops. And again: oh, Brane, I’m so scared of motorbikes, I could never do that. And something clicked in me, that little bad guy who tickles you when a chick is scared of something, so I ask her: you know, Lejla, do you want to go for a little ride, we won’t go fast, I’ll take good care of you. Jesus, no way, I’d die. Every time when I’d see her after that, I’d say, c’mon, Lejla, just one time, just a lap, and she’d shake her head like a kid when mom tries to get a spoonful of spinach in his mouth. The more she refused, the more I wanted to see her and talk her into it. This went on for I don’t know how long, half a year at least, then the spring came and everything was green and sweet-smelling, and girls who back in the winter were still kids hit the streets, one more beautiful than the next, and the most beautiful of them all was little Lejla. I’m sitting on the bike out in front of Café Promenade, and there she is, always one foot in front of the other, she doesn’t see me, she doesn’t see anyone, she’s taking her beauty out for a walk, conscious of it for the first time in her life, and nothing else matters. I call out to her: c’mon, Lejla, let’s take a ride. She stops, bowing her head a little, like a kid who’s embarrassed. It’s hard to know what she is anymore, or who she is, but I think she’s funny, like little girls in bloom often are, in the season of their lives when just this once they are neither woman nor child. C’mon, Lejla, don’t be like that, I try and persuade her, and she just stares down at the bike’s wheels, then at my shoes, and says: fine, but just one lap. I tell her, sit close behind me and hold tight. She doesn’t want to, she’s scared she’ll fall off. Fine, sit in front of me then, and lo and behold, Lejla sits down. We scoot down Ðure Ðaković, then off toward Bare, as fast as the bike will go. I can feel her trembling like a bird, her heart pounding like it’s going to stop, and it’s like she’s somehow shrinking there in my arms, like she’ll soon be a doll. And when we hit top speed, I whisper to her: I love you, Lejla. We stop, she looks at me, like she wants to ask me something, she opens her mouth, wants to say something, but nothing comes out. I think it’s funny, I see her all messed up, not knowing if I really said what I said or if that’s just what the fear was telling her. She’s there again the next day and says: c’mon, Brane, just one more lap, but slowly, please. I know what she wants, she wants to check that thing from yesterday, and I like that. I sit her on the bike, fire up the Honda like it’s a plane, she trembles and shrinks, I think it’s worse than yesterday, and again when we hit top speed I joke: I love you, Lejla. You know the rest, we stop, she looks over, like she wants to ask, like she doesn’t want to ask, but nothing happens, we go our own ways. I don’t need to tell you what happened the next day or the one after that, Lejla found me or I’d find her, I’d smile and say nothing because I knew what she’s going to say. And we’d do it all again. At top speed I’d tell her: I love you, Lejla. This went on the whole summer long, through the fall too, right up until the winter. A day didn’t go by that I didn’t take Lejla for a ride and whisper to her that I loved her, and she just trembled every time like it was the first time, her heart pounded, her soul wanting to escape out of blind fear, and when we’d stop, she never knew whether I’d said what I’d said. In February I saw the war was on its way and thought to myself, c’mon, Brane, Germany calls, save your head, show them your back. Your back can haul cement, but your head, hell your head can’t take a bullet. So I left, and Lejla stayed. I locked the bike in a garage, an idiot thinking the war would pass and that I’d ride again, but the war didn’t pass, and I didn’t ride again, and Lejla never asked me for another lap.
Mama Leone Page 24