Zagreb Noir

by Ivan Srsen

  She took a drink and grimaced. Then she drank a little more.

  Yes, you just have to get used to the flavor, I wanted to say, but I kept quiet. The radio was playing the latest hit: “I’m asking for your blessing, Mama / To accompany me into the fine battle . . .”

  She reached out to change the station, but he said: “Leave it alone.”

  Then came the chorus: “A Croatian mother bore me / She was proud to bear me . . . ”

  These two have some serious problems, I thought.

  He was rolling another joint. No matter how drunk he was, he always managed to get himself together enough to roll a joint.

  She cut off a little piece of pancetta and ate it without any bread. Then she lit up a cigarette and drank the rest of the wine in her glass. She poured some more and asked me: “You want some?”

  “Okay.”

  “You?”

  “I’ve still got some.”

  She said: “It’s kind of stupid to sign up for the Croatian Defense Forces because of me.”

  At that moment I thought: Ah. That thought hadn’t entered my mind. This was his way of undoing it all.

  Looking at the joint, as if he were studying how well it had been rolled, he said darkly: “I signed up on my own!”

  “Don’t get yourself all worked up. Tomorrow I’m leaving.”

  He looked up at her and said nothing.

  I drank some wine, lit a cigarette, looked around, studying the corners in the dark on the other side of the room. If it weren’t for that damned blackout I would have left.

  Instead I said: “The guy that’s singing . . . we went to the same high school.”

  “Bravo!” she said. “That’s like having been in the same homeroom with Ian Curtis . . .”

  “You see, they looked like one another . . . pensive like . . . but each developed his own style.”

  She laughed, but those were facts. Her laughter was tremulous, a little broken up.

  He lit up the joint. After he inhaled some for himself, he passed it to me. I took a couple of hits and passed it to her. She took a big hit.

  “Where are you going?” he asked, looking off into space.

  Oh yeah, I thought, it’s not over yet. I have to be quiet again.

  “I’m leaving,” she said.

  I wondered what that meant.

  “You mean really?” he asked.

  It seemed that really meant going somewhere far away.

  “Yes, I’m leaving. It’s over. Problem solved.”

  She passed him the joint as she got up.

  “We’re not together. Not that we ever were,” she said to him. And after a pause: “There’s nothing left.”

  I think she was maybe waiting for him to say she was wrong. His gaze wandered; he exhaled in a frustrated manner.

  Then she did something that surprised me: she went over to him, bent over, grabbed him by the jaw, lifted up his face, and started kissing him. She kissed him aggressively, as if she wanted to suck him in, and he responded similarly from below, like a happy dog on a chain. Then her hand went down and she grabbed his balls—I saw it.

  “Let’s go into the bedroom,” he murmured, as if he didn’t want me to hear.

  “Let’s fuck!” she said, sliding down on the couch with her arms around his neck. “Let’s fuck so people will see us.”

  He stopped. “You’re crazy.”

  She turned to me, with those lips and that hair that fell down on her cheeks, with those eyes and a slightly twisted smile. “We’ve been fucking for three weeks. Like there’s no tomorrow.”

  “Maybe there isn’t,” I said.

  “We fuck, at least it seems to me, in secret,” she said, turning to him. “Ain’t that right?”

  “Calm down!” he shouted.

  “But you can be our witness, proving that we fucked,” she said, as if she were talking to me again, although everything was directed at him, and I could remain drunkenly quiet as my temples throbbed.

  He exhaled looking the other way, as if she were embarrassing him.

  She was peering at him now, waiting for him to say something, to give her a chance, to utter a response. That was clear.

  “I’m leaving in the morning, you understand?” she said, getting back on her feet.

  He didn’t have anything to say. He shook his head, as if some crazy woman were abusing him.

  “We’re no longer together at all, you hear? I can fuck him too,” she said, meaning me. But she didn’t look at me.

  “Fuck whoever you want,” he replied, and his whole body shuddered, almost tipping over.

  Then she bent over again, began kissing him like before, but somehow more desperately, as if she no longer loved him but was doing this out of spite, to prove something to him. That was how I saw it, being drunk, and there was something terrible in it, and so I straightened up a little, went up to them, bent over them, and put my arms around both of them. It seemed to me that he started sobbing, and she leaned her cheek against mine, and soon, very soon, she simply put her lips on mine and kissed me. I thought I could taste the bitter taste of tears.

  “What are you doing?” he bellowed up at us, and I didn’t know whether he was talking to her or me. They are no longer together, I thought to justify myself, and everything is just what it is. It’s happening today and there is no tomorrow.

  It seemed he’d pulled down her panties—we were standing and he was sitting. And soon, somehow, it’s hard for me to explain it, but soon it seemed to me that she was mounting his cock and then I lost her lips, they were moving in front of me, and I was watching her eyes, so black, so dark, and I was absolutely sure that she loved me. Still, she was fucking him, and so after a bit I sat back down where I’d been sitting . . . and I watched him enter her as she lay on her side . . . I was aroused, but so what? Was I supposed to unzip my damned fly? Put my cock in her mouth like in a porno? He was now fucking her from behind so there was an opportunity to do just that.

  Then she took a look at me and it seemed that she didn’t recognize me. I waited for her to stretch her hand out to me. But she didn’t do it, as they do in a porno, she didn’t reach for my cock. So I sat down closer, right in front of her, and we started kissing again. He was fucking her and I was kissing her.

  We kept kissing until she came. He came too, inside her, it seemed to me.

  I stood up and went to the bathroom. I got in the tub, turned on the hot water, lay down, and came quickly. I must have fallen asleep in the tub and when I got cold I must have gotten out and gone over to the couch, because I woke up there, covered with my jacket and a blanket that had appeared from out of nowhere. I woke up with a dull headache, to the light of the lamp.

  I sat for a little bit on the couch until I realized I was naked. The blinds were all the way down, I didn’t know whether it was day or night. I got dressed, went to the sink, and drank water out of my hands.

  I started toward the front door and then hesitated, with my hand on the doorknob. One question flowed into another. I stood there with my hand still on the doorknob, leaning with my shoulder on the door, as if I were eavesdropping on the world outside. Was it day or night?

  Then it hit me: next to me in the vestibule, the greenish phone had started ringing.

  Maybe they were calling him.

  It was daytime out there.

  Night Vision

  by PERO KVESIĆ

  Tuškanac

  Translated by Stephen M. Dickey

  1.

  I didn’t do anything to get like this, I was simply born this way. Moreover, for the longest time I didn’t even know about it myself. I can see in the dark. Put simply, that’s what I can do, though it’s not completely true. If it’s pitch dark, say, in a completely sealed photographer’s darkroom before the red light comes on, I can’t see anything either. But all it takes is for any kind of light to come in under the door, and I can find my way around.

  We grew up on a street on the edge of a big park, and we often play
ed there after the sun went down. When we chased each other through the bushes in the dark I could catch anyone, but no one could ever get me. My favorite game was hide-and-seek. When we grew a little older and would get into fights with kids from other streets after dancing at some party or disco, if the fight was in a dark yard, unlit entryway, or a suburban street without lights, I would swoop down like a great horned owl on guys twice my strength and size, which gave me the courage not to shrink from them even in well-lit places because I’d learned how to handle them. I explained this with the idea that I was used to the darkness and others weren’t. Whenever my grandma sent me down into the cellar or up to the attic to get something and offered me a flashlight, I never took it because it would just get in my way. Whenever I was coming back from the park after sundown, I chose the darkest paths under thick trees, because I liked the darkness. I’d always liked nighttime as much as daytime, if not more. Indeed, bright light even bothered me. In the summertime I usually wear sunglasses, and then I forget that I have them on when the sun goes down. It often happened that I would start reading something in the afternoon that was interesting and engrossed me (I remember the books that I was really interested in—Winnetou, Tarzan, Zane Gray Western novels) to the point that I couldn’t tear myself away from the next line to get up and turn on the light, and so time got away from me, and suddenly my mother or grandma would come in the room and ask, “What are you doing in the dark?” Nothing bothered me even when I started taking girls to the darkest recesses of the park. They would clutch my arm and stumble on the path, which I interpreted as coquetry, as an excuse to hold onto them more tightly, say, when they pushed my hands away when we finally sat down on a bench or unconvincingly said, “Don’t,” before they gave themselves over to me.

  It happened many times that me and some friends went into an unlit stairwell and I would get up to the third floor without even groping while the others were still looking for the light switch in the entryway. But I didn’t attach any importance to that. It wasn’t until I was in the army that I realized I was different. They sent me into Montenegro, deep into the mountains. There I encountered darkness like I hadn’t experienced in my life. Many of the soldiers were afraid of the dark, but I felt like a fish in water in it. The military trainers instructed us to observe and move in the darkness.

  “Don’t look directly at what you are trying to see!”

  “If you are watching the horizon, raise your gaze a little higher!”

  And when I started consciously following their instructions, I discovered that even I was surprised at how much I could see. I didn’t say anything about my ability, but I greedily took in the explanations. There are rods and cones in the eye . . . the former react to black and white, light and dark, the latter to color . . . The cells that are sensitive to color are mostly located in the middle of the cornea, the surface onto which the image is projected; the cells that are sensitive to light are concentrated around the center . . . At night there are no colors, and so those sensitive to color are unused . . . There are people who see well in the darkness and there is a medical term for this ability: scotopic vision. The only use I got out of this was to trade night watches with soldiers who wanted to get out of them for other duties that I didn’t like, such as cleaning toilets; after I started doing that, my time in the army became almost nice. At night I would change two or three sentry posts and read a book in peace, and during the day I slept while the other soldiers performed various unpleasant and senseless tasks. Of course, I made sure to take books that had rather large print, but if there was any moonlight the size of the type wasn’t any problem at all.

  At night, or in the dark, vision nevertheless works differently than in light. A lot of little particulars and fine details vanish; all one can see are bigger things and whole objects, often only as silhouettes, and if it’s really pitch dark, not even that. Still, it’s rare that it’s impossible to see anything at all. On a night with no moon in a forest with thick tree cover—yes . . . but who among us has ever been in such a place? At night, in old bunkers, cellars without electricity, abandoned underground passageways . . . hardly anyone ever ends up there without a very good reason. But I had never missed an opportunity to pass through such places, practicing my skill at moving according to my sense of hearing, touch, and logic. And since hearing is much more important for moving through the dark than it is during the day, I practiced and it became second nature for me to move around silently, even when there wasn’t any need to do so. I can pass over ground covered with dry leaves and branches without making a sound, even in army boots, not to mention city pavement in soft rubber shoes, the only kind I buy.

  2.

  The street where I grew up is in a residential part of town. The houses there are prewar villas (I mean World War II) surrounded by spacious gardens. Those who’d settled in them when the Ustashas were in power either fled or were forced out by the Yugoslav Partisan movement, whereupon these villas became homes for members of the new authorities—ministers, high officers, physicians, and directors—as well as for members of the working class and the oppressed common people. The former mainly received entire apartments, which usually meant whole floors of individual buildings; the latter were settled into a room or two, so that several families would inhabit a single apartment, often together with the former owner, who was now forced to live in a tiny bedroom. Simple math shows that there were relatively few of the former, and significantly more of the latter. But by the time I was born, conditions had already changed quite a bit. After their initial excitement at having any kind of roof over their head, everyone discovered that life under a common roof is also a kind of hell. Some requested and, without anyone’s intercession, received new apartments in other parts of town, and moved away. The remaining tenants spread into the rooms that had been previously occupied. Others were aided by the fact that some of their fellow tenants had enough influence and connections to ensure priority placement in what were referred to as “community apartments.” (Community apartments had one, two, or three rooms; nationalized apartments had four, five, or six rooms or were built according to the “one house, one apartment” rule.) Such neighborly help by influential friends considerably accelerated the predominance of notable members of society receiving premium apartments over the anonymous members of the working class. In a relatively short time (by around the midsixties), the oppressed commoners had almost vanished from the neighborhood.

  * * *

  My old neighborhood is called Tuškanac, after its main street, which leads up the spine of a hill through woods toward a mountain outside the city. I liked that Tuškanac was in fact mostly woods. I like woods, especially at night where there are no city lights—no lit display windows or billboards or automobile headlights. In Tuškanac there is also a valley, and through the valley there runs a forest road, which is called the Dubravka or Sophia Road.

  All the kids from Tuškanac went to an elementary school on Jabukovac Hill. When the time came to attend high school we scattered to various prep schools located, as we said, “in town.” To get to class and back I always took the Dubravka (Sophia) Road. During the day I enjoyed the woods, the birds and squirrels; at night I enjoyed the darkness. The crowns of the trees joined high above the road and on nights without a moon it would be so dark that not even I could see anything. I went most of the way by stepping with one foot along a little drainage ditch at the side of the road, and I walked some parts of the road blind, from memory. Nevertheless, that was not only more fun and interesting but also safer.

  In two large prewar villas, actually palaces in the middle of Tuškanac, there were homes for orphans, homeless children, kids from troubled families, and other unfortunates. They attended the school on Jabukovac Hill with us, and there were no problems with them when we were all at school together. The problem lay in the fact that among them there were a few dozen pubescent and fairly well-developed girls. On Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays those girls went into town to the dance
halls. After the dancing some boy usually walked each one of them home. The boys didn’t like to walk through that sparsely settled and dark area, not to mention going back alone the way they came, and so they usually brought a friend or two with them, and sometimes even three, four, or five. Who knows what those boys expected, one can only guess, or at least what the one who brought his friends along expected, but when the girls finally left them or ran inside their homes, the boys were disappointed and bitter, and often already tipsy. It wasn’t pleasant to run into a group of them taking the road back into town. The least you could expect was some name calling, verbal insults, general harassment. In worse cases there was scuffling, pushing, sometimes a punch or two. Three or four times a year one of us was beaten up seriously.

  In such cases we had a strategy. The one who’d been beaten up went into the nearest friend’s house and got on the phone. The thugs didn’t count on there being a telephone nearby. At that time there wasn’t a phone in every apartment, and people waited for years for lines to be put in, and in the end it often took a bribe in the amount of an average yearly salary to get a telephone number. However, in Tuškanac every house had a phone. We would call the guys on Goran Kovačić Street and in Rokov Park, tell them how many attackers there were, describe them, say who the worst of them were, and a group would immediately race down the Aleksandar Stairs to Dežmanova and wait for them. All they had to do was keep them there for a bit. As soon as the phone call was finished, several of us from the center of Tuškanac would gather in a flash, and rush down the hill with the one who’d been beaten up in the lead (if he was able to run). We would charge at the boys who’d been detained by our Goran Kovačić Street friends, and without saying anything we’d start hitting them. And the guys from Goran Kovačić Street would start hitting them too. Together we would beat up those wretches so that they would never even think of attracting anyone’s attention if they by any chance ever came to our part of town again.

  Do you remember Walter Hill’s The Warriors? A great movie. Not only did I watch it several times, I lived it.