Zagreb Noir

by Ivan Srsen

  Fišerova, my street, has no other building to the east; across from it are the grounds, surrounded by a stone wall, of the Church of the Madonna of Lourdes which can be entered from either Zvonimira or Vrbanićeva streets.

  When I moved into this apartment in February, I was not yet fully aware that the building had tricked me. It did this the way a streetwalker would. The building is on a side street, a nice enough edifice by Zagreb standards, and the short one-way street can only be accessed by the residents. It has cute little balconies with a view of the church garden, a decent façade on which there is no graffiti—a true rarity in this city—and a glassed-in entranceway which in no way hints at what lies behind.

  After my divorce I was in the clutches of a brief hysteria while I searched for a new apartment to move into, to purchase. I don’t know what it was that gripped me, but I know I was not capable of staying on in the place I had shared with my husband for some fifteen years. I searched only briefly for a new apartment and rushed headlong into the first one that seemed like it would do. Yes, this very one. Standing on the sidewalk on Zvonimira I eyed Fišerova, and walked over to the building and into the entranceway of number 3, took the stairs to the second floor, and then to the third, and got a little winded—there is no elevator—and in the end stepped into this apartment which had just then come onto the market. I took an immediate shine to the forty-five square meters: the kitchenette, bathroom with toilet, hallway, and two smallish rooms. I settled the paperwork with the owners, extracted the standard information that the apartment was in good shape, the neighbors were decent, everything was fine with it, and a month later I moved in, pleased to be living in the center of town yet a little apart from the hubbub and the crowds. Only then did I remember that I hadn’t inquired about who had lived there before. I never asked whether anyone had died in the apartment, probably because I figured they’d lie: when asked about such things, Zagreb apartment-sellers always say that the people who used to live there are still alive, or died in a hospital, or in some faraway town. No, I did not ask the previous owners anything that would compel them to lie.

  At first I was caught up with all the things people do when they move: painting, buying new furniture and parting with old things that don’t fit in the new space, sewing curtains, replacing old appliances, frustrated when I overshot my credit limit, trying out new locations for the bed, dragging furniture around the apartment to the point of absurdity . . . I spent very little time in the entranceway and I must have neglected to inspect it carefully. As if I just didn’t see what I should have been seeing. I didn’t notice that on the courtyard side of Fišerova number 1 to number 3 were what the residents call “galleries.” These were, in fact, tiers of concrete balconies running the length of the building on each floor, and together they created a crater of gaping landings, edged by a low cast-iron railing, facing a yawning, dark, concrete pit of a courtyard in which the more privileged parked their cars. This is a fact I really missed in the true sense of the word. Missed, because I did not want to see that the courtyard side had absolutely nothing in common with its outer façade. Or something like that. Had I circled around the building from Zvonimira, and then if I had come out—via Fišerova—onto Vrbanićeva, and from there onto Heinzlova to number 32 where there is a passageway into the shared courtyard, and had I stepped into the courtyard from there, I would have seen that I was standing at the bottom of a cavern, the sides of which went up four floors. I would have smelled the stink of the pit which I now constantly smell, and with it I’d have had a foreboding feeling of misfortune and of some sort of ending that this stench evokes even for people less sensitive than me. I would also have smelled the bakery that briefly masks the pit stench and then releases, even more intensely, the reek of rot and mold.

  If I were to seek a simile to describe my building, it would likely be something trite . . . such as: my building is like a sixty-year-old woman pumped up with silicone and Botox who seduces kids in cafés, and whose body has been betraying her for the last ten years just as the last ten years have betrayed this building. The façade allows not a glimmer of the true state of the building’s body. The courtyard was, apparently, copied by the architects from the classic prisons you see in American movies: a jailhouse courtyard over which, stacked one above another, run verandas the length of each floor, and from the veranda you can enter your apartment-cell. The kitchen and bathroom windows look out onto the shared balcony. The gallery. They look out and everyone looks in. Light from your windows can be seen from every floor and also from the courtyard. And here ends any notion of privacy.

  During the first days after I moved in, I spent very little time in the kitchen; there was a lot to do, food was the last thing on my mind, and I had no feeling for the kitchen; and the bathroom, which was supposed to afford a modicum of relaxation, made me nervous. After my first shower I realized I would have to cover the little window facing the outside balcony completely, put up some sort of opaque blinds, something that would prevent the light inside from shining out on the gallery, or rather the veranda/balcony and the open maw of the courtyard. Money was running low and I didn’t have the time to take care of this immediately; after a while I got used to leaving the light off so that everything in the bathroom was done in total darkness. The same was, more or less, true of the kitchen.

  When I look back, the way I remember it is that only a few days after I moved in I started thinking about the balcony access, the windows whose lights shine for all to see, and, with that, the naked fact, the “information”—as we call it today—about whether a resident was home or not, which room they were in, and what they were up to. Perhaps that same day, I can no longer pin down exactly when, I began to listen for the sounds of water sluicing down the pipes from kitchen and bathroom drains and the sudden swoosh of flushing. I do not remember exactly when I starting doing this, but two weeks can’t have passed before I drew a low chair over to the kitchen window from which, in the dark, I watched the windows of my neighbors. And then, that very evening when I pulled the chair up to the window, I realized that not a single neighbor’s window was lit. I was stabbed by the realization that all the residents at that very same moment were standing by their dark windows and watching the windows of others. I got up from the chair, ran into the room in the other part of the body of this Botoxed, siliconized building, and looked out that window onto a street no one walks along, into the garden around the church and the birches bowing rhythmically to gusts of wind as if they were growing by a mosque and not a Catholic church. My, my, what a blasphemous image for this cleansed city of ours. Not even nature, if one can even speak of nature in such an urban setting, was going to let me off the hook. If there is someone irritated by early spring, it’s me. Nowhere does early spring seem quite as ugly as it does in Zagreb; there’s nothing green, nothing blooming, there are leftover chunks of ice everywhere and on them little shimmering puddles of oil, the sidewalks filthy with smears of clay where something is always being dug, the pavement corroded by the salt with which the city defends itself from ice during the winter months . . . and the stray cats. The view through the window of that room out onto the birches that were truly bowing in a kind of despair only heightened my extreme discomfort. It didn’t occur to me to go into the bathroom or undress for the night. I lay on the new bed that stank of fresh glue. The new-furniture smell is what I blamed for my insomnia. I got up in the morning, managed to see to the essentials in the bathroom, and decided to venture out and buy some food. I got dressed, slung my bag over my shoulder, unlocked the front door, and stopped. I didn’t move another inch. Those who know what a pathological attack of panic and anxiety is like know there is nothing that can force a person to leave the place where he or she happens to be. Those who are not familiar with this fear cannot imagine it. The word fear will just have to suffice. I tried to lift a foot, step over the threshold—no dice. I pulled back from the doorway. Run and hide, hide in the smallest room, in a shadow, in a hole, in some tight
space, tighter than the apartment-cell, in a crack, in soft fur, in a womb . . . This is why almost every person, regardless of age, calls for their mother when they are afraid: not to get help, no, but to summon the refuge of the womb. I understood: the apartment had become my jail cell and there was no way I would leave it on my own. Someone would have to come and get me. If I survived.

  That day, or rather the night that followed, I stopped sleeping in the clinical sense, and life continued along the trajectory it had already begun and there was nothing more to be done about it.

  Days followed of going hungry while feeling no hunger pangs, forcing myself to chew on an assortment of refrigerator scraps, opening the odd can, faking wakefulness and then fleeing into phony sleep, lifting my head up off the pillow and imagining sounds, listening to genuine feline yowls, rising and standing by the kitchen window through which I tried keeping track of the neighbors’ nonexistent lights. Corridors that I could see down became irresistible and I kept perusing them and memorizing even the slightest changes: a cardboard box was set out there a few hours ago and now it’s gone—why is it gone? There were boots there—why have they been moved? On the floor below mine someone pushed a cupboard over so it hides the lower kitchen window—why hide it? But what I did not do even once, which would have been the only healthy thing to do in this whole story, was actually walk down the open balcony, this gallery; I also never read a single name on a door. The neighbors remained nameless for me and this was the last straw in a process even an inexperienced physician would diagnose as paranoia. Fear of the nameless. Well, yes, if this was paranoia. For the illness, or condition, of paranoia is not based on what really exists, while everything that was happening to me and my apartment was real, real at this moment, to the point of banality. It was, simply, verifiable. Verifiable, as was the elementary fact which those who were secretly watching my door had surely registered—that I tried to leave the apartment several times but got nowhere. Dressed, I would stand for a few minutes in the doorway, lower my gaze, and stare at the threshold as it grew and grew until it blocked my view of the corridor. No, as soon as I pulled back, as soon as I shut the door from the inside, everything returned, more or less, to visual normal and I felt just a little better. I retreated to the room, lay down on the sofa which had not yet become an enemy that smelled like glue, and I would succeed, with extreme effort, in making myself face the fact that thresholds cannot grow, that my condition was a case of jangled nerves, that I was surely suffering from a delayed reaction to the divorce, the move, and that forty-five years was a short time when you were living an orderly life, and a long time when you were starting to live again from scratch.

  No, I felt no hunger, but I still knew I should be eating something, forcing it down—the food in the refrigerator was gone. I had a few cans of food, loners always have them. As long as there were still a few left with that nameless little tab on the lid that simplifies opening it up, everything was fine. I’d swallow a few bites and forego the rest. I admit I even did something I had never done before and which I can in no way explain or justify: whatever was left in the can I would shake out the living room window. I think I recognized my own hunger in some other invisible being and was drawn by a disturbed and more or less hunger-fed pang of solidarity and a diseased awareness that I should be sharing my sustenance with someone else. That someone else was not there with me, so my subconscious sought the someone else on the street. The hungry are always out there. No, I do not know why, but I do know that this was what happened. Soon all the cans with the easy-open tabs were gone. I still had larger cans of food, but I couldn’t open them for they did not have the handy little tab; the can opener had been misplaced somewhere. All sorts of things had been lost in the move. I discovered there were no more caches of rice or instant polenta, and based on this I was able to ascertain that quite a lot of time must have passed since I stopped venturing out. I decided: it’s now or never. Go out only to buy that miserable can opener that will save you from starvation. I got dressed, picked up my pace as I neared the door, opened it, and stopped. I stared at the threshold. It did not grow, but it offered me something much more terrifying than a surreal swelling. There was a dead bird lying there. Probably a sparrow. I leaped back and slammed the door. After several minutes of gasping and swearing, I called the police for the first time in my life. After half an hour, or so it seemed to me, the doorbell rang. Overjoyed, I jumped from the armchair and ran to open the door. A policeman was standing there, I greeted him, looked him in the eye, and then gestured toward the threshold which I did not have the strength to look at myself. Then I mumbled: “There, see what my neighbors have stooped to. A dead bird.”

  He looked down, then up at me, and said, calmly: “Ma’am, where is this dead bird?”

  I said nothing. As I remember it, he told me he would have to come in, he had to take a statement, something like that. I know he sat, he asked when I had moved in, he asked about my relations with the neighbors, he said it was possible that the bird had been there, but now it wasn’t and he wasn’t doubting me . . . Yes, of course: as soon as he sat down he asked to see my ID. That’s how it’s done . . . He left after a few minutes. I sat there confused, disappointed. I knew how this all must look: I had accused an unknown person of something I couldn’t prove.

  The difficulty leaving the apartment didn’t change. Nor did the problem of food. Yes, of course I could have called a friend or an acquaintance and asked for help. But help is sought by people who still govern their actions, and I no longer belonged to that majority. For weeks I called no one, I answered no calls, and for the most essential I responded with a feigned cool and a brief explanation that as soon as I settled in I would give a housewarming party. No one pressed to see me; people soon tire of lame whining from divorcées. Especially from the jilted. They have enough trouble with their own marriages. There was nothing left for me to do then, though I sensed I would not have the oomph to cross the threshold, to keep at it. And I tried. Needless to say. A dead bird. Again a dead bird. I tried twice more, I no longer had the stuff in me for another go. I lay on the sofa, for I had permanently abandoned the bed with its glue smell. Because of the awkward position, my limbs were numb and stiff, but I would not use the bed. Curled up in a ball, I lay on the sofa and with my last ounce of strength I sucked on some stuck-together candies. This was my only nourishment. I was soothed by the thought that I would fall asleep with no pain. Just like that, fall asleep forever. That is what I was thinking.

  I don’t remember the day, or whether it was even proper daylight, but I do remember that my nearly defunct ear caught the jangle of the doorbell; I remember I wasn’t certain whether the sound was real or imaginary. But I got up and, gripping the furniture, made it to the miserable door. I opened it. I know this sounds diseased, but in the doorway was a man who looked so incredibly similar to Alain Delon that I laughed aloud for the first time, or so it seemed, since the divorce. Of course he looked nothing like the Botoxed, wrinkly old-man Alain Delon, but like the one from the old police movies, presumably dating back to the time of the urban legend about the actor running through the terrible open balconies of the building at the intersection of Vukovarska and Držićeva. Or was that actually Anthony Perkins?

  “Ma’am, a few days ago you lodged a complaint about a disturbance. My colleague who visited you then has since been reassigned, so now I have come to check up on whether anything like that has happened again. Don’t let my civilian clothes confuse you, we are not always in uniform,” he said, essentially, though I admit that his exact wording was more concise and less courteous.

  I let him in, my adrenaline kicking in, the pathological exhaustion from hunger waning. I told him everything, including the dead birds, and said that I had stopped leaving the apartment because of them, though I knew full well that this was a lie, and that I had shut myself up in the apartment before the first dead bird appeared. He listened. Then he took out a piece of paper and a pencil. “Mrs. Levi, are you c
ertain your neighbors are the ones who left the dead birds at your door?”

  I responded nervously: “You have it wrong, I am not Levi. I am Anda Palma.”

  He smiled, glanced at the piece of paper, and said, “No, you are Mira Levi. It says—”

  I got up, furious, went to get my ID card, and shoved it at him resentfully. He gave it a passing glance. He didn’t smile this time. “Believable first and last name. Anda Palma. Believable document. But you are Mira Levi. We know this for a fact.”

  I was not frightened, I was not overcome by a panic attack, I was literally engulfed by horror, such a chilling horror that I was barely able to breathe. Still, I snarled at him.

  “Who are you who know this? Why are you out of uniform if you are a policeman? Please show me your badge!”

  “Never ask anyone for their badge, especially not a cop. You have no idea what a badge looks like, and even if you did, by the time you get around to checking it you’ll probably be too late.”

  Sometimes it happens that a person who looks remarkably like someone else drops the likeness and becomes an ordinary, unfamiliar face. But this face which I had been looking at and whose eyes were looking into mine—this face so much like the young Delon—morphed completely and became the smooth face of the young Anthony Perkins, grinning with a pure innocence. And with a pure innocence he flashed his idiotic ID. I do not know why, but this calmed me down. Somewhat reassured, I managed to say: “You must know who I am. I am Anda Palma.”

  The grin faded. His face relaxed, then tightened, and showed a row of overly white teeth. Then I clearly saw that he looked nothing like Alain Delon or Anthony Perkins, but like an indifferent German shepherd. This is the look of a healthy murderer.