Zagreb Noir

by Ivan Srsen

  A little socializing wouldn’t hurt, he thought, justifying to himself why he had indulged his first impulse and without a thought ordered this almost perfect woman. Had he stopped to think, he probably wouldn’t have, just as he hadn’t done many other things in his life.

  * * *

  Little drops of sweat had merged into a single larger one on the delivery guy’s forehead. Who knows how many deliveries he’d made that day.

  Petar never felt comfortable around delivery guys. He wondered whether they hated themselves and if that hatred spilled over onto the people to whom they were delivering food, goods, and everything else. He tried to dispel this feeling of awkwardness by giving tips, but each amount seemed somehow pitiful, condescending. Every time, he would remember this one instance with an older delivery guy. He’d taken a pizza from the man and handed him five kuna. The man had stared at the coin in his hand for an eternity, as if Petar had handed him a piece of chicken shit­—he’d stared at the five kuna with disgust.

  On the other hand, Petar felt equally awkward in the company of people in general, perhaps with all living beings. I can’t know what someone is thinking by the expression on his face. Who knows, he’d sink deeper into bleak thoughts, maybe the delivery guy actually enjoys delivering, the postman bringing the mail, and the waiter serving drinks—how the hell can I know what’s going on in their heads?

  “There you go, delivery is free of charge,” mumbled the guy while handing him the package and, instead of turning to go, lingering for a moment in the hallway.

  Petar reached automatically for his pocket, but found only small change. “Just a moment.”

  He set down the package on the shoe stand and started riffling through his jackets on the coat rack. In one pocket he found two crumpled bills, a ten and a twenty. In a panic he thought ten kuna was too little, twenty was like throwing money around, and giving the guy all thirty was out of the question. What kind of a message would that be sending, he asked himself, if he were to throw around thirty-kuna tips? He imagined this man, who had just delivered an inflatable doll, making fun of him to his colleagues at the sex shop: What a miserable fool, you should have seen him, boys, I tell you, he gave me those two bills as if they were two wilted leaves of lettuce—the fucking pervert.

  “For your effort . . .” he muttered, and handed the ten kuna to the guy.

  “Oh, no, no . . .”

  “Please, take it, I insist.”

  “Okay, but you shouldn’t have . . .” The guy finally took the bill and glanced at it briefly. That same glance, again, that could mean anything, and Petar still couldn’t shed the feeling that this was a look of total disappointment. “Is everything okay?” the guy asked.

  “Yes, everything is fine, thanks. Have a nice day, and . . . yes, cheers.”

  “Cheers, bye.”

  Closing the door, he took the package and flung it, in a rage, to the other end of the hall, and then, in passing, kicked it into the kitchen. The package banged against a chair, the arm of the chair tipping over a cup with coffee dregs in it that was sitting, for some reason, on the very edge of the table. He watched the coffee as if entranced, while it dripped down the leg of the chair and pooled on the floor.

  Have I gone mad? Did I just have an inflatable doll delivered, give that guy a ten-kuna tip, and then say, Cheers? Why can’t I deal with even the simplest transaction? Who cares what someone thinks of a tip and whether it insults him for some lame reason? No one cares about people they don’t know, about their feelings, their principles, so why should I?

  Petar spent hours more in an exhaustive analysis of his past actions, mistakes he had made with others and everything bad that had been done to him; at moments he took pity on himself and then he’d hate himself for it, and for a change he’d pity the rest of the world, such as his parents, his neighbors, Katja, yes, her more than the others, and not because she didn’t have her reasons for leaving, but because she had the audacity to enter his life, turn everything upside down inside him, and then leave him to deal with the mess! He felt sorry for all those lonely and unhappy people who knocked around their rooms like ghosts, listening to the creaking of the furniture, and always wondering whether every life was worth living and why the void that begins at the moment of death would be any worse than the horror that life entails.

  Jessica spent the night in the package on the kitchen floor.

  * * *

  She looked crumpled and not at all sexy. After he had inflated her, things improved, but only slightly. He rummaged through the cupboards and drawers and came up with some items of clothing Katja had forgotten in her rush to leave or hadn’t wanted to take with her.

  We’ll dress you up in this skirt and top.

  Jessica didn’t mind. She lay there stiffly with her arms offered in a factory embrace.

  Petar felt something like stage fright; the air, it seemed, filled with the fragrance of the distant southern seas. He fished out a cigarette, went onto the balcony, and after some ten days of abstinence lit up. From somewhere the smell of burning rubber reached him. He scanned the horizon but nowhere did he see a trace of smoke. He felt slightly dizzy from the cigarette. His knees wobbled.

  “What the fuck do you want from me?” He stormed into the room and struck the doll. “Tenderness, love, a hug? Forget that . . . forget it, fuck you!”

  Jessica said nothing. From the blow to her head she bounced away, tipped over onto her stomach, and stayed lying there. Her skirt had slipped up, exposing her perfect round bottom.

  “That wasn’t me,” he whispered, stroking her red hair. “You must forgive me, Jess, it won’t happen again, I promise.”

  Her dogged silence made him feel worse than all the harsh words or actions such an expensive doll could have used to fight back. Somewhere at the very edge of his consciousness there was always the information, like a flickering lamp: This is an inanimate thing, you know, it doesn’t feel pain, love, scorn, or anything else. From other centers, however, the opposite information was fast arriving.

  “We are equally living and dead, doll, you and me, facing them alone.”

  Equally real and unreal, dear, like living wraiths at the end of the world.

  * * *

  That night Jessica and Petar made love. Actually, love came later—even he was able to distinguish sex from the various degrees of bonds between two people. He was genuinely disarmed by the way in which Jessica communicated, and she did it, at least at first, telepathically—she’d broadcast her thoughts into space. Part of this he could understand, while the rest turned into incoherent noise melting into the ordinary hum of the city. One time he deflated her, pressed the life out of her, rolled her up like a crepe, and stowed her away in the box.

  That was his last act of rebellion against the new form of reality which fell like a heavy curtain cloaking the ossified, fossil world. The process of change is slow and painful. You want to interrupt it all with violence, but in the end, he thought, we are probably headed for something better.

  The next day he was already combing her flaming hair and singing, “Good morning, star shine, the earth says hello . . .”

  The first fears and insecurities were overcome like childhood diseases. Without considering the consequences, Petar simply gave in to the new idyll. With Jessica he felt somehow whole, as if she—exactly as she was—was perfect, what he had been missing his whole life.

  The baseball season was in full swing. She confessed to him that she rooted for the Dodgers and she watched, with intense focus, two games in a row with him, which Katja could never have handled—she’d begin to roll her eyes and pout after two innings, reproaching him that no one in their right mind could understand baseball. He did not have to sketch out for Jessica why it was the perfect sport and why it made most other sports seemed like lowly village games. They laughed over romantic, sometimes silly comedies, listened to old jazz albums, sometimes he talked about himself and she listened with great interest as if his life were an exciting t
hriller; whatever they did, she never held him back, and Petar, at least a little, began to feel comfortable in his own skin.

  “Jess,” he declared one day, “I think this is love.”

  And what else would it be, my dark Petar, than love?

  “Does that mean that you love me, you sea bear?”

  I love you, you hippo.

  “And I love you, you Tasmanian devil you.”

  * * *

  In early August a guest appearance was announced by one of the rare contemporary writers whose books Petar had found a place for in his home library.

  “David Albahari is coming from Canada for a short tour of former Yugoslavian countries.”

  A Canadian writer, is he?

  “Jessica, baby, Albahari is a Belgrade writer. It’s just that he lives in Canada,” he explained.

  Well, that’s terrif, replied Jessica—literature was not at the top of her list of the most important things in the world.

  “He will read from his most recent novel in Zagreb in less than three weeks and it will be right here, near us, in the neighborhood.”

  Nice.

  “Would you like to go? I definitely want to go.”

  But you never leave the house.

  “Jess, of course I leave the house, just not every day like other people.”

  You go ahead. I’d rather stay home, if you don’t mind, my little flying bear.

  “I don’t mind, my little potato beetle, not in the slightest. You just stay here.”

  Petar did not mind. He knew he couldn’t expect understanding and approval if he was seen with such a young and remarkably attractive woman as Jessica. They’d think he was an old, complex-laden goat who didn’t deserve to be with someone half his age and many times more attractive. People are, regrettably, like that—shallow, hypocritical, vengeful, poised for a lynching at a moment’s notice.

  * * *

  All day long a south wind plucked, like a seasoned mariachi player, the thin strings of Petar’s nerves, pushing him into a state of heavy tension. Two hours before the beginning of the literary gathering, ready to go out, he plunked down on the sofa. His right hand was cold and sweaty, and his left dry and warm—he rubbed them together, linked his fingers, and twiddled his thumbs.

  Jessica lay behind him and stared at the ceiling.

  He had a bad feeling that something was about to go wrong. But what could possibly happen at a plain old literary gathering? Nothing, he told himself, Albahari would come, the moderator Petar Milat—they shared their first name—would lead the program, the owners of the club—Indira and Anja—and another twenty, possibly twenty-five people would show up, all of them members of various cultural and subcultural groups, the occasional failed writer, drunk actor, a couple of students, a couple of pensioners—all in twos like in Noah’s ark.

  The assembled audience would, all in all, be one of the most innocuous groups imaginable. Petar knew their type well: They often spoke all at the same time, discussed literature, Asian cinematography, Lacan, Barthes, or Cioran, they were tolerant, they were animal lovers, they spoke at least one foreign language extremely well, they regularly voted in parliamentary and presidential elections—this was their civil duty, they felt—they did not get into brawls in bars, they did not pick their noses and spit on the floor, they were all at Leonard Cohen’s last concert, they took yoga classes, they’d flirt with the idea of eating vegetarian, but then they’d change their mind—Hey, it’s complicated—and aside from their fondness for peculiar haircuts and eccentric clothing, they were as peace-loving and nonthreatening as a school of goldfish in a goldfish pond.

  “I’m off now,” Petar announced at one point, standing up and smoothing his pants. “Jess, as we agreed, if someone rings the doorbell—don’t open the door.”

  Si señor, she replied, still staring at the ceiling.

  * * *

  The usual city bustle bizarrely delighted Petar these days. Even so, he kept a wary eye on the passersby, their faces, hands, their walk.

  All those years he’d seen Lower Town as if it were a broken heart on the broad, lined palm of Zagreb. One late afternoon, finally stripped of all illusions, he discovered the real truth: here, in the very center of the city and the rest of the planet, there was a crime playing out at all levels.

  As much as people changed the city, so the city changed them with even less mercy. The mutual destruction dated from the very beginnings and wouldn’t stop until civilization was finally crushed. Everything would end in ruins. One day there would no longer be any people on these streets, the musty old five-story buildings would come tumbling down one after another.

  From an entranceway, leaning on a cane, emerged an elderly man. He squinted at the sun like a mole. It looked to Petar like he couldn’t go any farther, he just stood there leaning on the wall. For the last time, Petar imagined, this guy was taking in the world around him, while other people, blind to death, passed him by silently. Just two or three months before, Petar wouldn’t have been able to see him.

  Today, when I want it least, he sneered to himself, today I see it all: people inured to others’ pain, silenced, insecure, and lonely, people horrified by life, children and the elderly, men and women, gradually disappearing, vanishing, crumbling into the tiniest particles, which the next rain will rinse off the surface of the earth, along with all the other garbage.

  Just as it would wash him away. I am, he thought, destroyed to the core as much by my own guilt or destiny as by the fact that I grew up and stayed living right on this very spot, and not in some other, less real world.

  * * *

  Twice he crossed the street and both times waited patiently for the green light. At Zvonimirova he got onto the bus which had been running for weeks in place of certain tram lines because of roadwork, and took it to the Džamija traffic circle. From there, walking on the sidewalk, one step at a time, he reached Martićeva 14 and the reclining statue of fra Grga Martić, behind whose massive bronze back were Albahari, Milat, and a little farther off two young women stood smoking. He noticed the red smudge of their lipstick on the filters of their cigarettes.

  Petar still couldn’t pinpoint what would go wrong. He simply had this uneasy presentiment that had not subsided, perhaps it had even heightened by a degree or two.

  “Hey, Petar,” Milat greeted him, pumping his hand, “I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  He’d known Milat from when he was still attending literary gatherings and believed there’d be someone who would publish his amazing manuscript of several thousand pages.

  “Er, yeah, I haven’t been around recently, work, whatever.”

  Albahari was sitting on a bench and rummaging for something in a bag with a flashy DM logo. Petar nodded to him and Albahari nodded back. Milat was wearing a jacket that looked like it was part of the uniform worn by the leaders of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China. They ventured into a conversation about László Krasznahorkai. Milat had recently read his latest collection of short stories, and as they had once talked about the famous Hungarian, it was as if they were picking up where they’d left off.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” said Milat, “the book is 450 pages long and guess how many sentences he uses?”

  Petar could not possibly hazard a guess as to the number of sentences Krasznahorkai had employed in his most recent book because it had not been translated into Croatian—Milat had read the German edition—nor had he heard or read anything about it.

  “Fifty-three fucking sentences!”

  Petar thought it unusual that Milat had inserted the fucking into his declaration, but since he had said this with unconcealed relish, maybe the word had simply imposed itself, elbowed its way in, to bring the necessary weight to the whole sentence.

  “Incredible,” Albahari said, still digging around in the bag with his left hand.

  Petar couldn’t believe it either and said as much.

  “Fif-ty-three . . .” repeated Milat, stressing each
syllable.

  “Well, that calls for a drink.” Albahari had pulled out a bottle of something that could only be homemade rakija. “Help yourselves. I can’t before a performance.” He handed the bottle to Petar.

  On the label were the words, Deadly Brew, and below that—three grinning skulls.

  “A friend of mine gave it to me this morning. Have a swig, go ahead.”

  Petar smiled in discomfort, handing the bottle off to Milat: “You go ahead, I’ll have some in a bit . . .”

  Milat studied the bottle and took a swig. “Huh . . . nice burn, absolutely.” He blinked, his eyes bugging out.

  He might go blind from that noxious homemade hooch, thought Petar. It wouldn’t be surprising. He had read somewhere that in Russia people often went blind from drinking vodka distilled in unsupervised conditions.

  He wasn’t partial to rakija, but the bottle had come back to him and he finally sipped a little, not wanting to appear to Albahari and Milat like one of those wimps who refuses anything that isn’t by the book in its factory packaging.

  Albahari sat down and fingered the copies of his new novel and the two of them stood there in silence, handing the bottle back and forth, each taking a swig or two. Then some other people came and joined them. The bottle went from hand to hand as if they were putting on a performance in honor of the guest from faraway Canada.

  Taking advantage of the crowd, Petar slipped, unnoticed, into the club. He felt the rakija flame in his belly and spread through his whole body. He leaned on the bar and asked for a coffee and mineral water. The air suddenly filled with the fragrance of caramel. He watched the people moving in and out, the music and their voices mingling in meaningless, garbled clamor. He felt like asking all of them if they found nothing odd about the strong smell of caramel. They could smell it as much as he could, but they were pretending this was normal and it brought him to the verge of rage.

  He decided he needed to calm down. Gripping the bar he drank down the coffee and mineral water. It didn’t help, the flames had engulfed his head and hundreds of thoughts were seething inside. There was no way he could push them away or grab hold of just one; he felt weak and a chill climbed his spine like poison ivy.