The Journey Prize Stories 22

by Various

  The next day Sander stumbled upon a piece of luck. He had woken early and set out walking the town for the second day, inquiring at various shops and kiosks on the surrounding streets, navigating concentric circles around his hotel. With no results, he resigned himself to go back to the hotel, stopping at a bakery on the way. “I know a Dragana Petrić,” the woman behind the counter said in English. “She is a teacher at the gymnasium where my daughter goes.” He got directions and bought pastry filled with a soft, mild cheese which he ate on a bench in the town square. He sat beneath the marble war memorial and silently sounded out the columns of the dead, noticing that one man shared the girl’s – the woman’s – last name. It started to rain, lightly. In his personal and professional life he’d grown sick of the slick meaninglessness of words, but a list of people who died on a monument held, at least, some sort of accuracy. There is nothing diplomatic about death, Sander thought, then groaned. He looked around the square. He once imagined the girl’s home town to be a dusty, backward place, but only the prevalence of red-tiled roofs supported his clichéd guesswork. The facades of stores, café bars, and tenements could have been in any European destination, and there seemed to be only a few condemned, half-skeletal buildings or empty lots of rubble left over from the previous decade.

  Later, mid-afternoon, Sander arrived at the gymnasium and waited by the fence at the edge of the field in front, hoping she would exit through the front doors. He felt a little foolish, but didn’t know how else to get to her. He’d already tried both Petrić numbers from the book, in his prepared, broken attempts at Croatian which relied on the pan-Slavic basics of Russian. Both tries yielded quiet old women who asked what, or said sorry, to his repeated forays of garbled phrases and questions. The second one hung up.

  He’d thought seriously about looking her up while in Sarajevo, remembering that summer through his memory’s grainy lens. This was nearly twenty years earlier. He had been abroad the last few months before he married; he prepared for his career and polished his Russian in Leningrad. He then travelled southern Europe for a month. There was a woman he spent the night with in Italy, another in Ljubljana he fooled around with, and in Croatia there was another still, Dragana, with whom he became entangled for ten days on the Adriatic coast. When they met she had been holidaying with friends and he was alone. They would walk around talking half of the day and at night she would reappear at the café bars with her friends to dance. He remembered being with her at the beach, the sea clean and clear as glass, their heads above its window pane, and their bodies wrapped around each other below. The girl’s expression seemed for a moment so open and honest, excitable, before returning to a perfected coy look that made him wonder if the alteration had occurred at all. Had that really happened? Kissing her huge eyes. They feverishly stripped and then tested the bare surfaces of each other one afternoon in a room with curtains drawn, then every night until he left. He’d said something about the next summer. “You have been so great,” she had said before he left. After, there were two postcards sent each way over the Atlantic during the next year – one he disposed of before his new bride might see – and then nothing. Before long came the nineties and the girl’s country declared itself and war broke out.

  Now, as he watched the gymnasium doors and pondered those final moments, he believed that there had been two of him. One stayed there, on the brink, and saw the generosity of what was possible. The other returned home and didn’t waver throughout the years as husband, didn’t flinch as father. Students began to emerge from the school, first a trickle, then a crowd of dozens. None seemed to register his presence as they made their way to the street. Then for two minutes nobody came through the doors. The sun appeared, intense for late September. He had begun to approach the school when three young women came out. The one on the left seemed to have Dragana’s dark eyes, spaced wide apart – he wondered if she could have remained so youthful. He realized the impossibility of this as he stopped a few metres from them. The other girls talked on cellphones; none of them took note of him. He asked the unoccupied one in her language, “Does it have in there, the teacher, Dragana Petrić?”

  She turned her head. “Where are you from?” she answered in English, her eyes holding him. When he replied she said the teacher probably had left already. “I have to go.” She looked anxiously at her friends, who walked ahead and seemed to joke about the foreigner into their phones.

  “But, the teacher, Miss Petrić,” he said. “Do you know where I can find her?” She stopped, looking annoyed at his intrusion. But after a moment she sighed and produced a cellphone from her purse and called the operator, getting an address. He tried to appear good-natured, shrugging with his hands in pockets. She stared at him then, in that way that professes or pretends to know what was at the heart of the other. She yelled at the two girls to go on without her.

  “I know where it is, it’s not far from my house.”

  “You’re sure she isn’t at the school?” he tried again.

  She shook her head. “You can follow if you want, I guess.”

  Sander introduced himself and held out his hand; she hesitated, then shook it. “Vesna.”

  They walked down the street, further from where he’d come, away from the city centre, past tenements in various states of disrepair and tiny old houses. She asked how long he was staying in the city. He didn’t know. She looked up at him and politely smiled but didn’t say anything else. “Is she your teacher?” he tried.

  “She was, once. She is a good woman. All the students like her.” Vesna was blushing and seemed self-conscious now that they were walking together, alone. They went on in silence for some time and then stopped at an old apartment building. The girl waited while he pressed the buzzer beside the teacher’s name many times with no reply coming from the little speaker. “Nothing,” she said. “What can you do?” Sander pulled out his cellphone and tried calling, looking up at the balconies of the top floor. Vesna looked at his feet, the slightly scuffed black boots. “Well, I live just further, on the edge of town,” she said to him when he shook his head and put the phone back in his pocket. “Come have coffee with me and my father if you like, only a little while, and then you can come back and she’ll be here.” They started off again and quickly reached the end of a street where there were no more houses beyond and the road became gravel. Soon they were walking beside fallow fields. He suddenly had the notion she might be Dragana’s daughter – it was unlikely but perhaps they merely didn’t live together – her eyes were so distinct and similar to those he remembered. There was something older in them. They looked at him as if he was an equal, not a man probably three times her age.

  “Do you like it here?” he asked as they approached a house on a large, fenced-in plot of land populated with plum trees.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Eventually I’ll be in Zagreb, but for now this is fine.”

  The thought recklessly flickered in his mind that if she did in fact belong to Dragana and she was just the right age, well, she could be his too. “How old are you?”

  “I’m nearly nineteen,” she said as if it was a burden. “Older than my friends. My father didn’t have me in school until after the war and I was eight. But before long I’ll be finished at the gymnasium. I’m thinking about being a lawyer after.”

  He listened to their feet on the small stones beneath. “And your mother? This sounds stupid, but I thought maybe the teacher was your mother. And you were taking me home to her.”

  “I have no mother,” she said matter-of-factly.

  The house was very old but well-kept. Vesna directed Sander to sit down on a couch in the front room and then went into the kitchen. She returned with a sixtyish man, conversing rapidly with him, and Sander began to feel foolish for accepting her offer. He couldn’t understand them but heard the man mention Dragana Petrić twice and nod his head. Vesna sat down beside Sander. “This is my father,” she said. The man shook Sander’s hand and smiled pleasantly. He went into
the kitchen and reappeared with a plate of cookies and a tumbler of homemade plum brandy. From the bookshelf he retrieved a roughly sketched diagram on draft paper. It had lines and numbers on it, a misshapen house in the middle and a river at the bottom. He placed this on the coffee table directly in front of Sander. Vesna rolled her eyes and spoke harsh words at the man. “Don’t pay him any attention,” she said. “He’s always trying to make some deal.” He held up the piece of paper.

  When he left over an hour later, Sander’s face burned from the strong alcohol and a tint of anger, the piece of paper folded into his back pocket. The man had wanted to sell him the property directly next to them and the house on it for a total of twenty thousand euros. From what he understood, a Serbian family had rented there before the war and hadn’t returned after. The price was cheap, but the land hadn’t been officially cleared of mines yet. He thought it possible that the girl had taken him all that way to make a sales pitch – it seemed likely that they needed some money. Others had gone over the land and found nothing in the way of anti-personnel explosives, the man had said, forcing Vesna to translate. Eventually Sander began to suspect that the father was meaning to say Vesna would be more helpful with Dragana if he helped them with their money problems. Being a diplomat, the idea of blackmail normally put a wry grin on his face, but just then he felt foolish to be there. All that land would be his, the father had been saying in broken English. “Leave him alone,” Vesna ordered her father. To keep him quiet she occupied Sander with many questions about Canada.

  When he felt it was time to go, Sander thanked them for the hospitality and accepted the diagram, to pacify the man. “Dragana Petrić,” the man had said again, by way of goodbye. “Yes, of course.” Wishing him good luck, Vesna had put her hand on his shoulder just before he rose off the couch, and her eyes, and the idea of Dragana, held him again for a moment. Now, as he walked off of their property, another phone call to Dragana produced nothing. It was dark and he was getting nowhere. He kicked at the gravel as he turned onto the road.

  The last day of the fall festival had been full of anticipation. Her small city hosted the huge week-long cultural festival every year, attracting people from all over the former Yugoslavia, as well as Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, and others. The last night featured the finale concert, and celebrations spilled out from the town square. Dragana waded through the crowds with her mother, who wanted to find Krešo at his volunteer security post and give him some baking. Dragana had brushed off the webbing of last night’s dreams of ghosts that had clung to her most of the day. One ghost, that young man she thought she’d seen in front of Krešo’s, doing card tricks on the beach in 1985. The determination in his brow when he taught her one, holding her wrists to show her hands what to do. Another spirit in a different dream, her father, spooning cascades of sugar into her tiny cupped hands. As if extracting from Dragana’s unconscious, her mother had spoken earlier of her father’s pension – as she often did – but also of a foreign man who’d telephoned yesterday, and she’d only understood that he was looking for Dragana. She thought her mother must be mistaken.

  It was past midnight when they ran into her former student, Vesna, who insisted she show Dragana something, her eyes pleading. Dragana relented and left her mother talking with her uncle and followed the student’s back through the surging crowd that had already filled the main square. A traditional Slavonian band with mandolins shared the stage with a rock group, playing ballads and lively anthems in succession. Dragana and Vesna approached the Gradska Kavana cafe on the edge of the square. Most of the tables had been taken away to make room, but one remaining held a man alone, smoking with his back to the wall. Vesna told her she had found him at the square and told him to wait a few minutes for her return. She had a way of gaining trust, making one feel on the inside of a conspiracy.

  Dragana saw the man’s head slightly bowed, completely disengaged from the festival. She’d never seen anything so solitary. As they got closer she saw that he had a kind face. His cellphone rang but he watched the two of them approach and silenced it without looking. His eyes widened as he rose from the table and made two awkward steps. “I didn’t know ……she was going to.…” He gestured at Vesna with a crooked finger before letting his hand drop.

  Dragana realized then he was the same man as the one from the vision days earlier. She faltered as she was about to speak. Instead, she turned to the student, looking at the schemer suspiciously, and told her to run and tell her mother that she would be a few minutes. And then Vesna was gone.

  In English, she asked him if he was in fact the Canadian she had known once. “I think I saw you walking the other day.” The music was so loud that her words were barely audible to him. She opened her eyes wide to him and he laughed. He walked forward and raised his arms a little. Dragana reluctantly stepped in between them and let him hold her. She liked his smell, a freshness she associated with manliness. People began to dance in giant circling lines behind them, a snake uncoiling. They straightened out of the embrace and she asked him what he was doing back in Croatia.

  “I was actually in Sarajevo on business, but then thought I would come find you.”

  “Oh,” she said, trying to hide her unease.

  “The name of your city has been kicking around my head ever since …” his voice trailed off.

  She didn’t quite understand what he meant. The music and crowd made it hard to capture everything said. At that moment she reluctantly said farewell to the ghost of him, that notion of an old spirit reviving an exact past. In its place was something unsettling, incomprehensible. This man had thought to seek her out.

  “It’s, well, such a surprise to see you. You haven’t grown much older looking,” she said.

  “You neither,” he interjected, smiling. “You haven’t changed.”

  The absurdity and boldness of the statement struck her. She had in fact changed, irreversibly. That other person he presumed to know was a mere fraction of her self. “Maybe we can go somewhere quieter,” she said, “so we can hear.” As they walked down the first street, she was startled to see Krešo under the canopy of a crowded bar and wondered if he had seen her too.

  A few blocks away, they found themselves walking along the river under the light of the moon, which was nearly full. A cluster of teenagers drank spirits on the bank opposite, and a young couple were beneath a tree further down.

  “Do you have a family?” she asked.

  “A son,” he said.

  “But you’re not married?”

  “I was. Are you?”

  She wasn’t sure which answer would be the most honest, which the best, and if those were the same thing. “I was. I mean, I once thought he was gone for good, but he lives here, in town, on Jelačić.” She knew Sander couldn’t possibly know street names.

  “My wife had an aneurism and died quite suddenly.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wondering if it was recent. “How terrible.”

  “No, I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to impose. Don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

  She grabbed his hand to comfort him, but then felt disingenuous, and quickly dropped it. “How long will you stay?”

  “Well, that depends. On things.” He looked at her but she was focusing on something in the distance. They caught up on the generalities of life for the next few minutes as they walked. She had never been to Sarajevo so he told her about visiting the Tunnel of Hope, the city’s only link to the outside world when it was under siege for three years in the nineties. He said that to get to it you had to go down into the basement of a house, that the original tunnel’s 800 metres were dug entirely with a pick and a shovel. He also mentioned the assassination museum, precisely at the spot where Franz Ferdinand was shot. How he had stood for a long time in front of the museum’s storyboards, pictures, and artefacts, the gun and the killer who pulled the trigger. How the pants the man – a boy really, no older than his own son – wore that day were
encased in glass right in front of him.

  At her suggestion, they started walking back the way they came. “And what about your son?” she asked. “Don’t you worry about him?”

  “He’s a man now – what about him? Listen. I’ve been thinking about you so much the last week. Too much, probably. That summer on the coast.” He kept slowing down and turning towards her, almost stopping. Each time she continued walking, looking straight ahead. “I want to reinvent myself.” He seemed to be concentrating hard on the words.

  “Hmm,” she said, unsure. “Such high expectations!” She needed to lighten the conversation. “I really don’t think that people invent themselves. Moments do, conflicts and catastrophes do. Other people do.” She wondered how he thought he could have control over such things. The novelty of their reunion had begun to wear off.

  “The diplomat in me might agree,” he said. He stopped, clasping her elbow, but she kept moving so that he had no choice but to keep up. Back at the square, fireworks went off above them. He invited her to his hotel. He’d bought some wine that afternoon and they could drink it. She needed to get back though. And she couldn’t very well bring Sander to her family and try to explain; she wasn’t sure she wanted to. “They’re expecting me. I don’t know what to say. Another time.”

  He began to raise his hands, as if to embrace or run them along her cheeks, but instead stretched his arms above his head and made an exaggerated yawn. “Come to me tomorrow, will you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s a good idea.” They agreed on a time, both smiled, and when they hugged she practically bounced off of him, and then hurried into the crowd.

  The next day there was no knock on his hotel room door at the arranged time. Two hours had passed. When he called she answered and in a formal tone told him something had come up. She had to look after her mother and it was a bad time, many term-end papers to mark, but it was good to run into him after all these years and she hoped he was having a nice stay so far. She said it was a shame that he would have to leave soon. He tried sounding natural, saying, “Yes, we’ll have to squeeze in a visit before then.”