Zagreb Noir

by Ivan Srsen

  The time had come to get ready. On her cell she called everybody else: Gagarin, Buks, and Dikinsonka, her three friends from the squat.

  She maneuvered her backpack onto her back—into it she had packed what they’d need for this evening’s action: scissors, four rolls of wide brown tape, a red marker, a big roll of poster paper, a dark blue rolled-up raincoat, four skeins of black wool, a city map, and a plastic one-liter bottle of water.

  Last but not least, out of the closet she pulled her souped-up mountain bike which she had customized with her own hands. She kept it in her room, which made her folks fume, but there was no way anyone was going to get her to store it in the cellar. The bike was one of her body parts, she would not be separated from it if she didn’t have to. And it was no big deal carrying it up to the fourth floor and down every day, it was her baby!

  She could hardly wait to wheel it out through the front door of the building, sit on it, and ride.

  * * *

  Her name was Milena, so said her ID and her passport, but fuck, who had ever known an anarchist with a name like some fusty old Partisan. It always sounded to her like the ultimate in female docility, sappy and oh so populist. And besides, she did not “smell like apples” like the girl of the same name in the Novi Fosili song, more like homemade lavender-scented soap and fine-cut Virginia-style tobacco.

  Friends called her She-Warrior, or Warrie for short. When she was a little girl she had this thing about the cult classic The Warriors from ’79 and the kids from the hood dubbed her She-Warrior. She scuffled with boys, started her own neighborhood gangs, and every so often ended up in the ER with a broken bone or a gash. Her folks raged about it, but in the end she finished high school with straight As, and signed up to study sociology and French at the Faculty of Philosophy. She was a junior and could hardly wait to get her diploma and be done with school. She worked part-time at poorly paid gigs through a student temping agency and lived with her folks. Most of the time they let her be, as long as her transcript showed good grades. Soon the time would come when she’d be able to leave the bourgeois lifestyle of her parents and move into a city squat, into Medika; she felt truly at home there.

  * * *

  So here’s the thing.

  A citizens’ group had been putting up posters all over town announcing they’d had it with all the asylum-seekers threatening their purity. The story, as happens, began with some lame-ass petition from these “citizens.” They managed to collect 496 signatures in one week and continued putting up posters. The story had been all over the media for two days and then it was nearly forgotten. Until new posters appeared across town with the slogan, White Power for a Pure Zagreb, and in the corner was the logo of the Stormfront—a big Celtic cross.

  She biked around Lower Town and everywhere she looked, on lampposts, kiosks, tram stops, and walls, she saw the round black-and-white stickers on which the stupid slogan stuck out like a sore thumb.

  Everyone at Medika was talking about the posters; a team from the queer group agreed to put together a protest letter which they would send to various institutions and the city government. A small group of them decided they would ride their bikes around the city that night tearing down every poster they found. They would do it after midnight once the crowds on the streets had thinned out. In place of the Nazi trash they’d put up their own posters, handmade, with the message: Whose mother is spinning black wool now?

  They’d rip the others off the walls, stuff them into their backpacks, and destroy them later. On their poster under the message they’d glue a strand of black wool. She had thought they should put up something from Bakunin but his quotes all seemed wordy and complicated. And besides, these “big Croats” were dumb as a box of rocks and could only handle simple messages.

  * * *

  She got to Medika and saw a Stormfront sticker on the wall right there next to the door. With a quick jerk she ripped it off and, crumpling it in her fist, made a pitiful little wad of it.

  “Fucking racists,” she muttered to herself as she walked her bike into the courtyard of the squat. Someone came up from behind and tugged on her dreads. Turning, she saw Dea, a half-pint girl, a designer who had wrangled herself space at the squat last winter.

  “What’s up, cookie, talking to yourself?”

  “Cut it, Dea, I’m tearing down these crappy stickers, the city is plastered with them, and screw the jackass who dared to put this one right in our faces.”

  “Don’t waste your breath, darling, the world is full of creeps, get used to it!”

  “See, I don’t buy that attitude. Tomorrow these same assholes will come here and mess with everything we did. That attitude stinks too much of the mind-set that sent you packing from Požega. All the registering at town hall, church weddings, holy confirmations, the boxes of chocolates, whiskey for surgeons, and shit like that.”

  “Well, you sure are She-Warrior,” replied Dea, slipping into the gloom of the lower floor.

  She-Warrior walked through the dark smelly courtyard and into the building, pulled out a key on a braided lanyard, and unlocked the door. She wheeled in her bike—she wasn’t stupid enough to leave it out in the yard. Nobody was there yet, stuffy air enveloped her, she threw open the windows and dropped onto the shabby green couch, upholstered in a threadbare knobby fabric. Who knows where it had come from, a family probably put it in the trash after lounging on it for thirty years or more, and the squat crew spotted it just in time and toted it to Prostor. Good job, she thought, and wondered where the rest of the crew was. She had the feeling they were running late.

  The door handle finally turned and into the room came Buks. He waddled along with that penguin gait of his, gripping a half-chewed salty roll and a sack full of bottles of no-name beer.

  “Hey, you’re already here. Comfy?” he asked.

  “You bet, stretching from my toes to my crown chakra.”

  “Heh heh.”

  “Hear anything from the others?”

  “From Gaga, yes, he’s supposedly on the way and Dikinsonka’s with him,” Buks said, plunking down in the armchair across from her. He set the beers on the floor and concentrated on chewing the rubbery roll. “Fuck, this isn’t real food, it’s like this futuristic stuff, like crap for slaves—what tycoon heirs will be dishing out to grunts for their lunch break in the year 2057. Like in that movie, what was it, the one with all the hype a year ago maybe?”

  “Cloud Atlas,” she replied.

  “Jeez, like you know everything,” grinned Buks.

  “I remember stuff, what can I do? I read the book, that’s probably why,” she explained.

  Buks shrugged and worked off a screw top slow and easy. The CO2 hissed and the beer foam climbed up the neck of the bottle. “Want some?”

  “You know, not today, better not get drunk when I need to stay straight.”

  “It’s all good, the others will,” said Buks, sipping a few gulps and setting the bottle on the floor.

  They sat there in silence until the door opened and Gaga and Dikinsonka pushed through it. They came in laughing, red in the face with slightly bloodshot eyes, and barely said hello.

  She-Warrior scowled. People like them bothered her. She knew exactly what they had done on their way to Medika. They met up at Buks’s place for a long smoke and then set off into town. They passed by the Krivi Put bar, then stopped in for a beer. After the first round came the second and now they were, of course, tipsy and high, and on they went to the meeting at Medika.

  She was getting tired of this rah-rah anarchism; Žižek the maniac was onto something when he said 99 percent of the people were boring morons. Before she’d lost her activist virginity she had dipped into the pool of love and the unconditional embrace of every living creature she met at Medika. At first, back then, everything was new and wonderful, the days and nights flowed by like one hug after another, and she finally felt accepted. Finally she had shed the status of militant weirdo and met her peers. She didn’t give a shit when one
of those dolled-up douches from school teased her with comments like, “What’s up, change-the-world girl?” or, “So, are you a feminist or what?” She lost the fear that had dogged her for years—that her rebellion was a passing fancy of her youth that would last only until, pressed by her parents, she applied for some job and started working in a company that specialized in killing consciousness and conscience.

  Recently she’d begun to tire of her activist crew. She could see they were disorganized, lazy, and often relatively uneducated. Most of them were squatting and doing things out of necessity, not conviction. They cared more about a big party, booze, and smokes than they did about a well-designed protest and action. She was sure that in cities like Berlin and Munich and Amsterdam there were more people who would understand her.

  She came back from her thoughts and turned to Gaga and Dikinsonka. “Okay, you two, let’s put together the plan,” she said calmly.

  The two of them settled into an armchair next to her and Gaga pulled a piece of folded graph paper out of his pocket. “Here’s where I listed all the places they put up posters,” he said confidently, snatching the half-drunk bottle of beer Buks had started.

  She picked up the list and read it to herself. “Not bad, Gaga, I have to say, not bad.”

  “So we have to agree on who goes where and divvy up the stuff,” said Gaga. Dikinsonka and Buks nodded.

  It was decided that Buks would go to the western parts of town, she would go to New Zagreb, and Gaga and Dikinsonka would deal with downtown, Kvaternikov Square, and Dubrava. When the action was done they’d all meet back up at the squat. Tonight there was going to be a queer party, but they didn’t care about that, they cared about the action, and if it was still going on when they got back then they could let loose.

  She handed out the poster sheets, tape, markers, and a skein of wool for each. They sat around the big wooden table and went to work, almost like an amateur art class. The atmosphere at Prostor finally had the smell of endeavor, and she liked that.

  * * *

  A half hour earlier people had started drifting into the party. The yard at the squat was getting more crowded, and inside there was cool electronic music playing. Nothing new, Friday at the squat was always chaotic. She was glad they were leaving soon; she wouldn’t have been able to take the party at its peak and you could already see that the crush was going to be over the top.

  Buks, Gaga, and Dikinsonka were circulating, chatting up the crowd. She kept her eye on them so they wouldn’t wander off before the moment came for them to venture out into the night . . . which looked, smelled, and sounded like every other Zagreb spring night.

  Streets splashed with streaks of light and dark and from time to time a slow intercity train would whistle. Her bike now slid soundlessly over that black-yellow street linocut. She felt like Wonder Woman on special assignment. The fresh midnight air thrilled her, slicing through it with her body, awash with it, pouring into her nose, mouth, ears, combing her thoughts. It reminded her of a female character in Loving Sabotage by Amélie Nothomb. And the seat between her legs lightly stimulated her clit; she must be ovulating, she thought.

  She chose to ride on the sidewalk; usually she didn’t, but this was Friday night and drivers were mostly drunk. Sava Bridge was half-dark—she traversed it in a few seconds and soon stopped by the underpass beneath the rotary. There, on one of the walls, she spotted the white Storm Front logo and next to it, two posters. This is it, she said to herself, then scanned the area, dropped her bike to the ground, and opened her backpack. She stripped the posters in two tugs. It went pretty smoothly, she decided while she taped up the big white sheet of paper with its red message and strand of black wool glued in place.

  On she rode. Along the way she checked her cell to see if there were any messages from the rest of the crew. Nothing yet, they were probably just getting started. At Lanište she ran into a larger crowd, the neighborhood was full of bars that were just now closing, but there were Nazi posters scattered around like weeds and she thought about what she should do. Maybe it would be better to come back when she had done the rest of New Zagreb, she thought. So she did. She ripped off and replaced the posters one after another in Savski gaj, Trnsko, Siget, Sopot, Utrine, Zapruđe, Dugave, Sloboština, Travno.

  Buks messaged her: Nearly done, sis, no sweat, kids were after a poster, I said no, worried we’d run out. At the squat by 3:30. ;). And from Gaga and Dikinsonka: Center is done, a little hairy, will tell, in Dubrava now, desert, back soon.

  She felt her backpack grow lighter, only two more stops left and that would be it.

  She got to Lanište and checked the neighborhood, not a soul on the streets. She spotted a poster on a post by the bank, another by the nursery school. Back she went to the first spot and thought to chill for a minute on a low wall by the entrance to a building, her bottom sore from riding all night. She sat, stretched out her legs, and stared at the neon signs. A drop of rain splashed her face. The adrenaline still held her. For the first time she was doing something that really mattered. After this there would be talk about them in town, the older crew from Attack would take them more seriously now, maybe they would finally ask her to join one of their things. The newspapers and web portals would definitely report about it, everyone would be wondering who they were.

  It was time to get back up on her feet. She glimpsed the remaining posters in her backpack and crossed the road toward the concrete pillar she would be redesigning.

  As she slipped the backpack from her shoulder, the deaf night stillness was filled with voices, deep and male. Three guys soon walked out of the building entrance right in front of her. They didn’t notice her at first, but then . . .

  “Lookee, a kitty cat, all alone,” said one of the three skinheads who was zipping up his black down jacket with an eagle logo on the sleeve.

  “Hot damn, so she is,” chimed in the second in a bulging black suit jacket stretched across his massive pecs.

  The third guy, the skinniest, had a scraggly goatee and seemed out of it. His eyes darted all over the place and he kept his hands shoved in the pockets of his tracksuit.

  She assembled a sour half-smile and looked over at her bike, which was locked to the railing a few steps away in front of the bar. She drew her backpack to her chest. She inched toward the bike and started unlocking the chain. They followed her like hungry strays.

  Eagle Logo spoke to her: “Hey, you can’t go, I just started diggin’ you.”

  “Sorry, I’m in a hurry,” she said, tucking the lock into her backpack.

  “Why, where’s the fire, girlie? Let’s have us a chat,” said Eagle Logo, in a creepily cozy tone, and his buddies nodded and mumbled, “Yessiree.”

  They surrounded her. She realized she was in deep shit. She was still clutching her backpack with both hands, glancing back and forth between them and her bike.

  “So you’re like a punk, right?” asked Eagle Logo.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Shit . . . you look more like a dude, like you have a prick there between your legs, huh!”

  She looked at him with a mixture of fear and scorn. She wondered how she should respond. It would be ass-stupid to tuck her tail between her legs and try to run, then she’d really be in for it. She needed to take this slow, easy, gradual. Psych 101. She’d shift her backpack onto her back, sit real chill on the bike, and go . . . Yes, that’s what she’d do.

  The trio was meanwhile distracted by a farting contest. Eagle Logo was straining to shoot off a salvo and outdo Goatee, but his ass was on strike, he couldn’t pull it off. She sat on her bike, turned to heft her backpack onto her back, but it slid down her left arm and dropped to the ground. Their attention swiveled back to her.

  “Hey, hold it, no-no, girlie,” grumbled Eagle Logo, and leaned down to retrieve her backpack. He grabbed it by the soft, double-sewn handle and swung it in his hand, gauging its weight. “Wow, so light, what have you got in there, like rolled-up feathers, huh? I thought i
t would be a hundred times heavier . . . shit.”

  She smiled clumsily. “Women’s stuff,” she said, and reached toward Eagle Logo.

  “Look at her, she wants me to give it back,” said Eagle Logo triumphantly.

  She realized the moment had come to go as low as she could go. She’d try to soften them, this was no time for revolution, fuck it.

  “Boys,” she said in a silken voice, “look, I have to get home, it’s late, and the rain will be pouring in a minute, I felt a drop just now—”

  “I’m interested to know what’s in there,” interrupted Goatee.

  Eagle Logo flashed a predatory grin and unzipped the backpack. He slid his hand in and pulled out a bundle of folded Nazi posters. It was evident that they had been peeled off and stripped from walls. He took more and more of them out until he had nearly emptied the pack. There was quite a heap piled up in front of him on the low wall. “What the fuck?” he blurted spontaneously, while the other two gawked densely at him and the heap of paper on the wall.

  “Lookee, there’s something else,” said Goatee, excited, and reached into the backpack Eagle Logo was still holding. He pulled out the two rolled white posters with the red message and glued-on strand of black wool. He unrolled one of them.

  The three guys, astonished, studied the message for several seconds. Eagle Logo moved his lips soundlessly, grimacing precisely the way the long-deceased Croatian president used to do. “Why, goddamn, you’re a freak-girl. What the fuck is this?”

  She was silent, she did not have a single idea how to get out of there.

  “Hear what he asked you, stupid bitch?” said Black Jacket, sneering.

  “I heard,” she answered calmly.

  “So why the silent treatment, cunt?”

  “See? Hot damn, she went around town all night tearing down these posters. God fuck her the fucker, what a crock!” shouted Eagle Logo, who clearly was the only one who got it.