In those years Lotar was the strongest man in the city. That’s what people said, though no one ever really thought about testing it. He lived alone with his mother, Miss Edita, who had a shop where she pleated skirts. No one knew anything about his father. The story went that he had been a German officer, apparently his name was Otto, and that it had been a great love. He would secretly visit Miss Edita at night and stay until the dawn. No one ever saw him, as their love could only be in the time of the curfew. Otto, so the story goes, didn’t want to retreat with the rest of his army in April 1945, so he deserted and hid out in the forests above Sarajevo for two years. Every Saturday and Sunday Miss Edita would go and collect mushrooms, strawberries, raspberries, always returning with an empty basket. Dear God, you know I only go up there for the fresh air and the scenery, she told the neighborhood women, but they knew she went because of Otto. Lotar was born in the fall of 1946: it’s a child I wanted, not a husband, said Miss Edita, and no one ever inquired further. In an exception to the usual ugly custom, the neighborhood kept her secret and no one ever called Lotar a bastard. This was probably because he was an exceptionally placid and quiet child, always bigger and stronger than his classmates, but he never got into fights. It was as if every belligerence in his bloodline had been expended and exhausted before he was born.
One Sunday in the early summer of 1947,Miss Edita took the child into the hills. He needs to learn from a young age, she said to old Mrs. Džemidžić, who kissed her and the child: you just go, sweetie, and hold tight to what you’ve got while you’ve got it. They came back in the early evening. That was the last time Miss Edita went up into the hills, and people said that after that Otto had set off for Austria on foot, and then on to Germany. He’d waited to see his son, and then he’d gone home forever.
Lotar graduated high school and as a star student enrolled to study medicine, and right when you would have thought that everything in his life was going to be like it was in those stories about happy and healthy children, in his third year of college he met Gita Danon, a pharmacist’s daughter, two years older than him. Gita studied a little, but spent most of her time hanging out and breaking men’s hearts, all over Sarajevo, drunk and wild, as if she were breaking beer bottles until the morning came to clear her head. But the morning never did come for Gita, nor did she ever tire of her strange game. She would draw a man slowly to her, toy with him until the first kiss, and then she’d push him down the street, letting him roll to the end, to his shame and the horror of others who hadn’t yet felt Gita’s charms but knew their turn would come and that they too wouldn’t be able to resist her. The men would get over Gita after a time, wouldn’t mention her for a while, but sooner or later lips that had once tasted her kisses would say Gita was a whore. The only one who never got over Gita, who never spoke an ugly word about her, was Lotar, and both she and this reticence would change him and his life.
I’ll wait for you, it doesn’t matter how long, but I’ll wait for you, and you’ll come for me when you finally tire, he told her after their kiss, and she laughed, she laughed long strolling down Tito Street and on into the night, she laughed so hard the shop windows trembled and women came to the windows to see why someone was laughing so at this hour and in a world where nothing was that funny, where no one had a belly laugh like Gita, who wasn’t from this world in any case, and who not a single woman thought of as competition because she lived a life bestowed with a thousand lovers and a lone kiss, and come tomorrow she might be dead.
Lotar believed Gita would come back to him and that until her return he must defend her honor. In company, if anyone ventured to say something about her, Lotar would always cut in shut up, I’m here. And miraculously, everyone did shut up, even though no one really thought Lotar might use his terrifying strength. This is how things went until Gita chewed up Dino Krezo, a hothead and ex-jailbird who had marauded his way around Italy for years, returning to Sarajevo only to show off and spend a bit of money. So anyway, this Krezo was beside himself with rage, and to add insult to injury, someone told him about Lotar, probably warning him in jest about mouthing off about Gita in front of Lotar. Krezo immediately demanded you’re going to show me this guy and tore over to the medical school. They say he waited two or three hours, which only served to enrage him further, so when Lotar finally came out, Dino Krezo no longer registered the size and kind of man he was talking to but just went up to him, grabbed him by his coat collar, pressing himself up under Lotar’s face and saying in the quiet voice of a man who had a pistol tucked in his belt, fuck you and your fucking Kike whore.
What happened next is almost not for the telling, but they say Lotar grabbed Krezo by both ears and ripped them off, and the poor bastard collapsed, Lotar smacking his head in as he lay there on the ground. When the police arrived, there was nothing left of Krezo’s face. Four cops jumped Lotar, but he tossed them off, walked toward the street, sat down on a low wall, lit a cigarette, and from three or four meters away the cops cocked their pistols, not daring come any closer. It’s all over now, he said, I killed a man. It was then they hurled themselves on him, pounding him viciously with their fists, legs, and the butts of their pistols. Somehow they knew Lotar would never defend himself. Perhaps they had experience with this sort of thing, though I doubt they had ever come across a man like Lotar.
He was sentenced to fifteen years for a “particularly brutal murder.” Lotar sat a whole twelve years in the Zenica prison, just long enough for the city to forget him and for a new generation to appear on the streets, one that would never know anything about him or Dino Krezo. But Gita, no one could forget her. Through the years her beauty and laughter had not diminished in the slightest, nor had she quit driving men crazy with her lone kisses. Her lovers were now some fifteen years younger than her, but nothing had changed, and a man was yet to come along who could resist Gita giving him the eye, nor was there anyone in the whole city smart enough to work out that a story repeated for the hundredth time must always end the same way.
That summer when Lotar got out of prison, Miss Edita Burić, the owner of a workshop for pleating skirts, and Mr. Moni Danon, the oldest pharmacist in the city, both died on the same day. Two days later they were buried at the same time in the Bare Cemetery. One procession set off from the Catholic chapel, the other from the Jewish one. Lotar followed behind one coffin, Gita behind the other. The processions marched one beside the other, right up to the fork where the paths leading to the Catholic and Jewish plots veered off. Gita didn’t even look at Lotar, but instead of following his mother’s coffin, Lotar went after Gita. It was a terrible scandal. The crones in black made the sign of the cross, the priest said extra prayers, the Catholic procession appalled, the Jewish one afraid. Nobody knew what Lotar might do to Gita.
But he didn’t do anything to her, just said hello, Gita, yet she didn’t respond to his greeting, he said Gita, I’m waiting for you, and she looked at him as if she was going to smile, he said Gita, this is forever, and she took him by the hand and said sweetheart, that in front of me is forever, and pointed to the coffin.
After his release from prison Lotar started up his drinking. He drank with discipline and according to a set calendar, every seventh of the month, you could see his father was a Kraut, that’s what people in the neighborhood said, and not without respect. This is how it went: Lotar would find some dive and order a liter of rakia, the guests would start making tracks for the door, and Lotar’s husky no would stop them dead. They’d all fall silent and wait to see what would happen next, you could hear the buzzing of a fly and, every three minutes, the neck of the bottle touch the glass. Lotar needed exactly fifty-five minutes to drink a liter of rakia, not a minute more, not a minute less. Then he’d order another liter, dutifully pay the waiter and then thunder everyone out! and they’d leave all right, the owner and the waiters too, without even a word to Lotar. Fifteen minutes later the police would show up, Lotar would rise to his feet, and say hit me before I fuck you up, you, Tito, and the
Party, and they’d give him a thrashing, he wouldn’t defend himself, and afterward they’d take him down to the station, he’d sleep it off in the pen, and wait again for the seventh of the month. For five years Lotar took a beating once a month, and tongues were already talking about how much longer he could survive, how many more sevenths of the month the police might need to kill him.
And then the war began, and one September morning during the first siege Lotar found a note under the door: “If you want to know. I’m in Madrid. Gita.” She’d probably been scared of the war and had left Lotar a message, anxious as to whether in Madrid too there would be someone to desire her lone kiss. Gita was already fifty years old, which Sarajevo eyes didn’t notice but maybe Spanish eyes would, and Gita wouldn’t be Gita without a kiss; she’d never make it alone in a world without her humiliated men.
So now, whether Lotar hoped his waiting was finally over, that Gita had tired and exhausted herself and was waiting for him in Madrid with her love, or he simply couldn’t imagine staying on in a city where Gita wasn’t, it’s hard to say, but from that day on Lotar began planning his escape from the city to Spain. He didn’t have any money, nor did he have a passport, and didn’t know how he might acquire one or the other either. A giant alone in his own city. He started to skip sevenths of the month, his kidneys and ribs hurt, and with every day that passed following Gita’s message, Lotar aged more and more. His hair turned white, his muscles no longer smooth and taut, more and more people would pass him by, blind to his strength. Only one thing remained as monumental as Trebević: his will to go to Madrid, to his Gita, for a second kiss.
Two and a half years after the war started, Lotar vanished from the city. Before leaving he’d tried to borrow money for the journey, but no one wanted to lend it to him; people were sure that there was no returning from such a journey. He tried to get a passport, but they didn’t want to give him one of those either, he was still strong enough to fight and his love held no sway with the authorities. No one was surprised that Lotar left in spite of all this. People knew that when it came to getting to her, what existed between he and Gita allowed no obstacle, even when she was as far away as Madrid.
No one ever found out how Lotar made it across Bosnia, how he made it across all the countries that stood in his way, the manner or mode of how he traveled, or how he never encountered a single customs officer or policeman. What is known is that he appeared like a ghost at a police station in suburban Madrid, skinny, barefoot, and covered in scabs. He took the first policeman by the hand and said Gita Danon, por favor, the man took fright, Lotar repeated Gita Danon, por favor, and the whole of the station gathered, and backup arrived too, as did an ambulance, and Lotar stubbornly repeated Gita Danon, por favor; it took the Spaniards half a day to work out that he didn’t know a word of Spanish, so they tried in different languages, in German, Italian, English, and French, one even tried to address him in Hungarian; Lotar shook his head, clasped his hands in prayer, or took people’s hands in his and repeated Gita Danon, por favor.
A man in a white hospital coat took him by the arm and led him out of the police station, Gita Danon, por favor, Lotar gazed out the window of the ambulance, the man held his hand, and he glided through Madrid as if in a film, as if in someone else’s life, Lotar hunted the faces of passersby, hoping he’d see Gita; instead he spotted a billboard for a charity event, on it a photograph of Sarajevo’s razed National Library. Sarajevo, said Lotar, Sarajevo? the man in the white coat gave a start, Sarajevo, Lotar confirmed, Gita Danon, por favor, and clasped his hands.
Lotar lay in a hospital bed. His heels poked out through the bars. So frail and with his bushy beard he looked like the long-dead branch of a magnificent tree. A kindly older gentleman approached his bed, behind him followed a policeman and a doctor, the man sat down next to Lotar, Lotar opened his eyes, Gita Danon, por favor, the gentleman put his hand on Lotar’s shoulder and said to him in their language are you from Sarajevo? . . . I am . . . When did you get here? . . . Yesterday . . . From where? . . . From Sarajevo. The gentleman’s eyes began to glisten the way the eyes of Bosnians who’ve lived for twenty years someplace far away glisten when a dying man says that he has just arrived from Sarajevo. I’m looking for Gita Danon, Lotar tried to sit up, she’s from Sarajevo, and now she’s in Madrid, I have to find Gita Danon, she’s waiting for me, and I’ve been waiting twenty years and some for her. The gentleman nodded his head, we’ll turn Madrid upside down if we have to, Lotar didn’t believe him, but he was too tired to move.
That night in Madrid the strongest man of our city lay dying. This you have to know because you’ll never meet such a man again anywhere. There isn’t one anywhere in the whole world, not where you live, and not in Sarajevo were you to go looking for him. Yes, Lotar lay dying, the one and only Lotar, the Lotar who had ripped Dino Krezo’s ears off and beat him to a pulp on the cobblestones in front of the medical school, as well he should have, when it was for Gita’s honor.
In the morning he never regained consciousness. He didn’t even wake when the gentleman from the day before came in, nor when Gita Danon came in after him, crouched next to his bed, and placed her hands on Lotar’s enormous elbow, he didn’t even wake when she said my darling Lotar, I wore myself out, you don’t need to wait for me anymore, I’ve come to you, he didn’t even wake when she kissed him long on his gray lips. But listen well to what I’m telling you now, only Gita Danon knows whether Lotar’s lips moved back then, only she knows whether it was too late for love or whether it had remained forever. If you meet her, don’t ask her anything because she won’t say, she won’t say hello, Gita doesn’t respond to greetings, because she broke a thousand hearts for a single Lotar.
Mama Leone Page 27