by Ivan Srsen
Strange, only half an hour earlier the thought of death in my sleep seemed a blessing, but now once I had seen the countenance of death, fear set in. An animal fear of animal death. I caved in and my voice shot up: “Get out or I’ll start to shout!”
He was no longer grinning at all. Instead he chuckled sincerely. “You’ll shout and the neighbors will come running to help, the ones you complained were terrorizing you? A little unlikely, Mrs. Levi, wouldn’t you say?”
I did not shout. I whispered: “Where did you get the idea that I am this Levi? This . . . Mira Levi?” I even added, full of hope: “No doubt this is all a simple misunderstanding, maybe there was a neighbor who went through something similar and also lodged a complaint. And you switched the complaints. My documents are genuine, I am Anda Palma.”
“Yes, Mrs. Levi, the documents are genuine, but they are not yours. We have made no mistake, you somehow got hold of someone’s identity and that is what we are interested in. Nothing more.”
“Sir, you are wrong.”
“No, we are not.”
“Why do you keep referring to yourself in the plural? Perhaps you are only you, you the individual, the one who is wrong. Not the plural we, but just you, the one and only, the one who is wrong. Why hide behind the plural? I am not doing that, I know who I am.”
“You probably do know who you are and that’s why it won’t be hard for you to explain how you got hold of and why you are using documents that belong to someone else. Someone else’s identity. Who is Anda Palma?”
I let him go on talking.
“You, Mrs. Levi, lived in this apartment some twenty years ago, then you disappeared. There is no information on you, no files at the police showing you registered at an address. Nor a name change. Nothing. I know, computer error is possible and it happens more often than we’d like. And I am asserting nothing, I am merely asking: whose identity did you take? We know it was more than twenty years ago when you left our city. In this city we don’t linger long on those who leave, do we, but we would like to know how a person can disappear and then reappear under a different name. The last information we had about you, Mira Levi, is that you sold this apartment. And after that, nothing. The sale of the apartment was legal, just as the purchase of it was. But it is suspicious that you sold the apartment to people twenty years ago from whom you bought the same apartment back two months ago using a different name. They, of course, recognized you, but said nothing; all that mattered to them was the money. It’s tough to sell apartments these days, long gone are the 1990s. Your neighbors recognized you and reported it; we went to speak with the former owners and the story snagged only on the name. Your identity.”
“My neighbors . . .”
“Yes, your neighbors recognized you, they say, by the smell of cat urine that always follows you. They recognized you by the smell, though only later did they recognize your face. Women can easily alter what they look like, and some twenty years have passed . . . a long time for a woman’s appearance. Yes, they recognized you by your smell and by the way you tossed cat food out into the street just as you always used to. A cat came to thank you with the dead bird. Don’t cats do that? And there you have it. The whole mystery of the dead bird. We only care about how and why you took someone else’s identity. Let’s forget about the cats and the dead birds.”
What he was saying was so far-fetched that I clutched at the most ridiculous part of it. “What is that you said about a smell?”
“Mrs. Levi, a person changes over time. But their basic smell, despite all deodorants and perfumes, despite the aging process of the human body, stays the same. A person leaves their smell behind in the apartment where they live. Dogs know that best.” Again he sneered like a German shepherd. “No matter what you say, no matter what documents you present, you are not the person you claim to be. You are Mira Levi and your neighbors recognized you by your smell.” He slapped his thighs with a clap of finality as if he were getting ready to leave, and added: “Perhaps one of the descendants of the cats you used to feed developed a genetic ability to remember your smell and thank you in the name of all its late ancestors.”
I got up and went into the kitchen. To stop listening to him. He followed me. I was horrified by his soft steps. The patter of soundless paws. I was being followed by a dog, a German shepherd with a muzzled sneer. I was even startled when it spoke again with a human voice: “Have no fear, Mrs. Levi, have no fear of dead birds or living cats, or living neighbors. Just fear stolen identity. That you must fear, Mrs. Levi.”
Fear raised all the hairs up and down my body. He had shaken me . . . This man, this man-dog, was just standing there watching me when I grabbed a large can from the kitchen counter, swung it, and smashed him in the temple. He fell cinematically, as Alain Delon would have fallen. I leaned down and bashed his temple with the can rim until the bone showed through. Then I got up, looked at the dented, bloodied can, and on it, for the first time, I noticed the cat food label. My gaze crossed the bloody kitchen floor and rested on the emptied cans that had kept me alive for a month. Cans labeled as fancy cat food. I heard the hungry cats yowling in the courtyard. I did not look at the crushed face of the man lying there in his cinematic pose. Actually, I don’t know who he resembled or whether he resembled anyone at all. A handsome cop? A handsome, quiet killer? I wasn’t even sure whether it was Delon who played in The Trial, or Perkins. I do not care to check. Truth that comes too late changes nothing. Nothing changes. Nothing.
For I have murdered and nothing can be changed here.
Now I am waiting for them to come and take me away.
* * *
Mrs. Anda Palma, if this was she, stretched her stiff neck and glanced once more at her laptop. She did not reread the text she had entered. With her mouse she clicked forward. To all.
And nothing can be changed here either.
PART III
DOWNTOWN FFREAKS
Wraiths
by ZORAN PILIĆ
Downtown East
Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac
Let’s sell this place and buy a house somewhere normal. Give it some thought.
What do you mean, somewhere normal? A village? We’d keep pigs and chickens, plant potatoes? I can’t handle that, woman, no way. I’d rather die, right here and now, than live to the age of ninety-five in some village.
It doesn’t have to be a village. Just somewhere outside of this rat’s nest, these buildings with their grimy façades, away from the maniacs, weirdos, hubbub, away from this chaos and the old people dying alone in their apartments and rotting there for days and weeks or being devoured by household pets, away from the piss-rank entranceways, the cracked walls, the rot, the moronic, pushy neighbors, the children whose shrieks pierce the brain, away from this hell on earth, please . . .
Forget it. I’m telling you, no way. I will never leave here.
* * *
Petar, who was born, attended school, grew up, and still lived and worked all within the same few square kilometers, could not imagine what tragic circumstances could move him out of Lower Town—the only place on earth where he felt reality the way you feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. There was a world beyond the borders of what he had always experienced as essential Zagreb, it would be silly to claim otherwise, but that was not his world. So anything east of Heinzelova and west of Republike Austrije Street, north of Ilica and south of the train tracks, was simply not acceptable to Petar. He could nod to the rest of the world, even see parts of it from the perimeter of his territory, but nothing drew him out, and for the last few years, with only a few exceptions, he had stopped leaving the center of town, the beehive in which life and death were constantly abuzz.
In his youth he’d had the courage to visit several places in the outer ring: he went to the coast, Florence, Venice, Budapest, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Vienna, Dubrovnik, Portorož, perhaps a few more places, but none of them impressed him much. Sure, fine, the sea was salty, the people were welcoming and rel
axed, they lived in those sometimes even pretty towns carved of white stone, with planted palms, museums with phenomenal works of art, colorful sunrises and sunsets, the women were beautiful and alluring, the sky clear and the blue expanses just like on the postcards, yet his heart would start pounding only when he came back from these brief, pointless trips.
* * *
Katja left in silence.
While he stood at the door and waited for the love of his life to pack up her belongings, he pictured flinging himself to his knees and pleading: Stay, please stay—he pictured this scene stripped of all dignity, and knew he could never, physically, do such a thing. He would have knocked something over and it would have looked ridiculous.
From the start he knew their relationship would run its course in time. He had never been a babe magnet, he had never harbored illusions about his good looks or charm, after all, and once he’d turned forty things got no better, indeed they’d gone downhill.
After shipwrecks of her own, Katja had come into his life and he did not push her away. He let everything play out as it would.
“Jesus,” she had said, appalled, “your place is packed with pornography.”
Those are classics, he wanted to say. Instead he shrugged. Before the Internet had nearly wiped out the pornography industry, he had collected almost a hundred films with unforgettable stars of that detested genre which had existed and survived on the periphery of the cinematic arts, shoved aside and unacknowledged, the black sheep of the family. Select titles of films with Teresa Orlowski, Jenna Jameson, Traci Lords, Cicciolina, Vanessa del Rio, Moana Pozzi, Marilyn Chambers, and Linda Lovelace held a place of pride on his shelves side by side with great works of world literature and concert albums by King Curtis, Miles Davis, and Thelonius Monk.
Two forty-somethings in one of their last flings before they inevitably parted ways and drifted off into the swamp of indifference—that was how he saw them. And that is exactly how they were.
For a while he still felt her presence in the apartment. Her fragrance on the pillow, little traces everywhere, but then the place was flooded with the all-too-familiar feeling of angst that spread like rust everywhere, corroding heart and mind.
* * *
“Mr. Miller,” he began, “I apologize for taking your valuable time . . .”
“Oh, come right in, please. What brings you to me, my good man?” Mr. Miller had hair the color of burnished gold, unusually broad shoulders, and a square, jutting jaw; he gestured generously as if he wanted to dismiss any thought that he would be short of anything as inconsequential as time.
In the twenty years since Petar had been analyzing foreign currency payments at his job, he had exchanged perhaps ten words with his supervisors. The bank during these years had gone through a rough period: first it was sold to the Italians, then they sold it to the Austrians, and finally the Austrians, after a series of mishaps and major scandals with loans which went, as the saying goes, under the wheat fields to highly suspicious clients, they sold it to the Germans. Over the last six years, since Mr. Miller had been in charge of the department for foreign currency activity, he had become acquainted with and had exchanged at least a few words, purely out of courtesy or in passing, with almost all of his employees. He had never, however, met Petar, or at least he had no memory of the man, which was no surprise because, thought Mr. Miller, this is not a face that would be etched in one’s memory.
“I’ll get right to the point, if you allow me. I have been working here for many years, as I’m sure you know, as a foreign currency payments analyst.”
“Yes, of course.”
Mr. Miller had inquired of his secretary and learned that Petar did, indeed, work at this job, but what exactly analysts of foreign currency payments did was beyond him. This detail bothered him a bit, particularly because he couldn’t come out and ask, yet felt he ought to know what all the people under him did. In an ideal world, yes, but this, God only knows, was not an ideal world.
“I also want to bring to your attention that I have not spent a single day on sick leave to date, which you are free to corroborate.”
“No need, please, I believe you and I congratulate you, bravo! This is truly, as they say, an accomplishment worthy of admiration. Not a single day, I take my hat off to you, sir, you must be made of steel. I mean to say—your health serves you well and thank heaven for that!”
“Indeed, twelve years of service, not a day of sick leave, and orderly reports which have never received a single complaint from my supervisor. I approach my work seriously and thoroughly—nothing gets by me. Today I am here with my one and only request, sir: allow me to do this work, with the same fervor, responsibility, and precision, from home—that is what I am asking.”
“If I have understood you correctly—you prefer not to come into the office at all but to do your whole job at—”
“In my own apartment, correct. The whole thing is, clearly, technically, absolutely doable. It doesn’t matter whether I am here at the office, two blocks away in the silence of my own home, or in any city with an Internet connection on the planet earth.”
At a loss, Mr. Miller lightly smoothed his tie as if patting a rabbit or some other small animal. He had expected a request for a promotion or a raise, perhaps a complaint about a colleague, that sort of thing, but this fellow had something entirely different in mind. “Whatever prompted you, if I may ask, to make this unusual request for a change, how can I put it . . . of your work environment, your surroundings?”
“The reasons are of a personal nature. I do not feel comfortable around people, you know, I never have, but recently I’ve been finding it difficult to leave my safe haven. Even for five minutes. I am uncomfortable going into greater detail. This is the problem of today’s society, unfortunately: we are alienating ourselves from one another and retreating into our shells, into a reality we can control. Chaos reigns outside, as you can see for yourself.”
“True,” Mr. Miller glanced inadvertently out the window, “the outside world is one vast bedlam.”
The analyst of foreign currency payments and his boss, each at his end of the table, gazed for a time, silently, at scenes in the inscrutable outside world.
* * *
Freed of the obligation of going to work each day, those strenuous expeditions into the jungle of cruel office life, Petar soared on the wings of euphoria. He felt something not unlike happiness and an electric shock of good will, even elation at times, that would have scared him had not beneath it, under the skin, at the core of his being, his original sorrow been rolling along, his sorrow at the very nature of existence.
“Son,” his father had said, knowing his end was near, hence no need to prettify the truth, decorate it with illusions like one would decorate a Christmas tree, “life is full of shit—one disappointment after another. Life will not be merciful, so find shelter somewhere out of the wind, avoid trouble, and watch what you eat.”
His father’s words, as one might expect, did not fall on fertile ground. For God’s sake, he was barely eighteen at the time and still hopeful. Eventually he came to realize: there is no place for outsized expectations, life is truly a travail, a shit storm, and whenever you think, Here, I’ve found a place for myself—just as with his discovery of literature, he had longed to be creative and for a number of years had written and written as if in a trance, reading and writing again, and creating, in the end, an amazing manuscript that was over three thousand pages long—the shit storm invariably followed, and swamped him completely. No one, it turned out, would even look at it, let alone read his monumental work, and, feeling ridiculed and rejected, he realized that even in literature, the tried and true shelter for lost souls, he would find no meaning. Not even a respite.
And besides, he thought, I am not exercising, I’m not watching what I eat, I’m too old, stunted like a desert shrub, and I’ll probably never meet a woman who wants to be with me.
For days, weeks on end, he did not leave the apartment. He work
ed at his job on his home computer and sent his analyses daily by e-mail to the main office, his food and other necessities were delivered to his door, he downloaded movies and music from the Internet as did millions of others, and if he wanted to feel the warmth of the sun or a breeze, all he had to do was step out onto the balcony. At some point during the day, usually between ten a.m. and noon, he’d collect the garbage and go down to the building’s trash cans. Sometimes, not often and not for long, he’d light a cigarette and stay down there, observing the passersby through the narrow slits of glass in the front door. Women went by on the sidewalk as if in a dream, untouchable, and yet, he thought, probably they, too, from time to time, felt disgruntled, sad, lonely, or simply afraid of disappearing.
* * *
By early summer he had gone beyond a hundred days of voluntary confinement. With every day it got harder to imagine the moment when he would venture forth again, stroll around on the sidewalks, get onto a tram with the crowds, or have a cup of coffee at one of the outdoor cafés. Sooner or later, no doubt, he’d venture out into the open. Maybe out of pure curiosity, or, more likely, with some clear goal.
In Lower Town, the most real of all worlds, without much pomp or fuss, two new sex shops opened. If someone were to ask him what we talk about when we talk about sex and Croats, Petar would have answered, Croats are old school, most of us do it in silence and in the dark, like hard-line conservatives, but the opening of the new sex shops and the fact that the old ones were still in business did not support such theories.
At first glance, theirs was a standard array such as one can see on the websites for all city sex shops. Just for the fun of it, Petar examined the various toys and paraphernalia. The only thing that drew his attention were the deluxe inflatable dolls. Unlike the ordinary kind, these ones looked alarmingly real. He finally chose the Jessica special deluxe model, clicked on Add to Shopping Cart, and paid with his Visa.