There was one thing they liked to do in their worries: talk on the phone. I told them they could do it now and then when the news was bad. But they called up home at least twice a week—Tuzla, Belgrade, Zagreb—and the bill was horrendous.
(They were actually from Tuzla. Later I found out that Tuzla hardly had any war. They had that explosion in the center that killed seventy people, and a casualty here and there, but basically, the city had stayed out of the war. In other words, they were safer there than they would have been in downtown Cincinnati. I wish I could have helped someone from Srebrnica or Bihac or some other town where people were truly hopeless. But never mind now.)
“The phone is very expensive,” I said.
“Oh, is it? I read how you could hook up through the Internet and make free international calls.”
“I doubt it, my friend. Nothing is for free.”
“We better look into it. It will benefit you as well,” Milo said.
“That’s a good idea. Let’s turn on the computer and find out.”
Milo sat next to me, and I breathed shallow because he reeked of nicotine, old wet nicotine, maybe decades of nicotine coming out of his pores. I don’t think you can get rid of that smell. We went to all sorts of sites. We followed the directions, but it didn’t work, and then there were sites that guaranteed it would work, for forty cents a minute. But at that point, the man had already lost interest. He went down to my basement to use the weight room. He wanted to stay in shape. He’d stand in front of the mirror, sideways, an unlit cigarette on his lips, looking like a French actor, the kind that wears white socks, and scrutinize his biceps.
After all this, he continued to call freely as though we had transferred to the Internet, but the fact was that it cost 89 cents a minute, and that with a $4.95 a month international calling plan.
I bought them a used Nissan so they could get around on their own. May and I taught them how to drive. Selma learned most quickly. After she got the license, she said, “I just wanted to see whether I could do it. I can. But I don’t really want to drive. It’s too dangerous, too expensive, a bad habit, really. I don’t trust myself, and how could I trust others on the road? Someone may fall asleep, or have a stroke and slam straight into my car. All these ninety-nine-year-olds driving terrify me. The road is as dangerous as a low-grade civil war.”
True, wherever I drove her, she trembled in the backseat—wouldn’t sit in the front, for she’d read it wasn’t safe—and she’d bite her nails. So I was like her driver, driving her even to the mosque, made out of thick concrete, along the highway toward Dayton. (A propos of Dayton, even though the Dayton peace accord had already been implemented, Selma claimed they could not go back yet; they would not be safe.)
Now that she learned how to drive, she gave me tips from the back. “Why go through yellow lights? Can you cross the double yellow line?”
I can understand post-traumatic stress syndrome, but this was more like pre-traumatic stress syndrome. If clouds came, she’d sigh. “Oh my God, are these tornado clouds?”
“I have no idea.”
“Isn’t this tornado country?”
“Sure. Tornados, torpedos, tomahawks, we got it all.”
“But the house is made of wood. In our country, they make them of brick.”
I didn’t say anything. She’d want us probably to rebuild the house, and make it of stone, so they’d feel safer, like back home. Or maybe this was her version of nostalgia. She dreamed of their beautiful redbrick, red-roof homes. (Like nearly all the Europeans I met, these guys considered everything European superior to anything American, starting from their customs and produce and doorknobs and ending with the soul—we Americans are superficial and they are deep and passionate. If their countries are so fine, why don’t they use their own money, not ours?)
I don’t think people that get scared that easy should have wars, that’s just my opinion. Maybe Swedes should have wars, if they are all like Borg and that other guy, the tennis player, Edberg, who don’t get scared under pressure. But Swedes, just as if to spite their potential, don’t participate in wars. Neutral, pacifist. Or Jamaicans should have major wars. They are too relaxed for something like that. I know, these are stereotypes and as such probably all false, but it’s the nervous devils, like these Balkan peoples, who get into wars, simply because they are least suited for them. What you fear is what you get.
They always worried about their relatives, or so they said, but it turned out all the relatives survived. Now, I don’t doubt that a hundred thousand people were killed in the war and a hundred thousand disappeared (many to reappear in the States, Germany, and Saudi Arabia), but the rest of the four million survived, and not only that, but turned out to be profiteers. Many people used the misery of those two hundred thousand as a boon to get international sympathy, green cards, royal treatment all over the world. Maybe the non-victim types schemed to have the war, knew it was coming, could run away in time and show pictures of those who couldn’t. Their economy didn’t work before the war. They couldn’t emigrate. The war comes; half of them emigrate. And their economy back there is even worse than during the war. You know, I am not xenophobic, but I believe in the concept of home. Stay home. Visit briefly. Go home. Don’t attack anyone, don’t invade. When attacked, don’t run away. Very simple rules. The world would be much better off if people followed them.
I inquired at Proctor and Gamble to get Miro the engineer an interview. When I finally arranged it, Miro was indisposed; he claimed he had food poisoning, and gave me a lecture about how chicken should always be thoroughly cooked, especially if you’re feeding people from another continent who have grown up with a different set of bacteria. When I wanted to reschedule the interview, he said I should postpone it for a year, until his English got better.
“Isn’t chemistry spoken in the language of formulae?” I said. “You don’t need much English. You can visit with me and see that there are Chinese chemists who speak hardly any English, but they are the movers and shakers in the company anyway because they are geniuses in the language of chemistry.”
“That may be true, but my chemical engineering is ancient—old socialist backward science. I should read some current chemistry to catch up.”
I got him the books that were used in chemical engineering at U.C., but those books stayed unopened.
Instead, Miro went downtown, set up a table to play chess at the Fountain square, and hustled for money. He was good at speed chess—that just proves the point, that he was smart and had no excuse not to be productive—so he made some money, but whatever he made he spent at the racetrack, where once a month May took him with Selma. He was not good at betting. He had the theory that the thinnest horses always won. I don’t know why he had that theory; he himself was getting fatter. The American food clearly agreed with him, so much so that he ate all the time. I don’t think he saw himself as exploitative. He thought he was repaying us by his genius; he volunteered to teach Tina how to play chess, and strangely enough, she liked it. Every evening before going to bed, she played a few games with him, and he complimented her on how quickly she was learning. She laughed at many moves. First they played at the kitchen table, but later, on the floor, sprawled sideways, on elbows, like Romans at dinner. I knew of course that Tina was smart, and for a while, May and I thought it was wonderful that she was getting into chess. Chess at seventeen—there could be many worse ways to spend evenings. At least that kept her off the phone and out of the bathroom.
Toni did not like to play chess. “That’s for nerds,” he said. “It makes me too nervous. A basketball player must have good nerves and good posture.” I did not pay much attention to the whole thing. I thought it was a waste of time, except for keeping adolescents out of trouble and retirees from getting strokes. (For retirement, maybe I’d learn how to play the game if it weren’t for online investing. I think trading stocks will do for my synapses. On the other hand, who knows whether there will be a stock market in thirty years?
Maybe computers will make it obsolete the way they are making chess simply an antique game, and all the profits will go to IBM and Microsoft.) Anyhow, the little chess tutorials certainly did not compensate for the amount of food our guests ate.
At first during meals, Miro and Selma, but not Toni, were demure and dainty. They ate little and declined seconds, and kept saying, “Oh, it’s so kind of you. How will we ever be able to repay you?”
But then, when they thought we were asleep, they’d tiptoe to the refrigerator and raid it—drink a quart of milk in one standing, straight from the carton. They’d eat all the salami, roast beef, and even uncooked Frankfurters. I thought the war had something to do with religion—no true Muslim would have eaten the stuff in the refrigerator, certainly not the ham, but Selma did not pay attention to the subtleties.
When I saw them eating at the refrigerator, the whole family, she said, “We’re still having jet lag, that’s why we are hungry at four in the morning. That’s almost noon in Bosnia, time for dinner.”
The first time this happened, I laughed. But I never knew anybody to have jet lag for more than a month. Even a year later, they’d have their feast at four in the morning, eating by the light of the refrigerator.
All these matters so far were a prelude for a clash. Since I am not a very subtle guy, I imagined my moods made them uncomfortable as well, and here we were, the donor and the donee, passing through the kitchen with many knives. One of these days we might use them.
Now, my daughter actually liked them. When Tina got her driver’s license, she drove them wherever they wanted. She was proud of them. I was worried that their son would take up with her. She was only a few months older than he, and I could catch him staring at her. Naturally, as a father, I have trained myself not to look at my daughter’s body, but I am aware of it, in a sort of protective way, and I know it looks good. So I had to make sure that the two would not stay in the house alone.
But one Monday at breakfast, when we were to eat together—May’s idea, to have lavish Monday breakfasts to start the week in a good mood—we realized we hadn’t all gathered.
“Where is Miro?” asked Selma. “Where could he have gone?”
“He’s still probably asleep,” May said.
“How would you know?” Selma said.
I wanted to get breakfast over with fast so I could read thestreet.com and realmoney.com before the market opened at 9:30. I had put thirty thousand dollars in one stock, Zenith, since I’d read they had developed a high-resolution screen for TV, and the stock was supposed to fly that Monday with the licensing approval. Generally, I held no positions over the weekend, but here, this seemed a sure bet. Still, I was nervous, wondering whether the stock would double or triple. I could make a yearly income in an hour! So the last thing I wanted to worry about was Miro’s sleeping habits.
“He’s an early riser,” Selma insisted. “Where is he?”
Tina was not there either, but I assumed she was preening in the bathroom. So we ate hash browns, which my wife liked to prepare her way, with sesame oil and anchovies and CFO eggs. While enjoying the taste, I tuned out of the crisis conversation—I enjoy nothing more than orange yolk and crispy hash browns my wife’s way.
“Maybe she took him to a grocery store to buy cigarettes?” May said, when Tina was nowhere to be found. They all wanted me to call the police and to drive Fountain Square to see whether the two were chess hustling together. So I drove, but I did not find them at the Square. I was worried, too, worried enough that I forgot to check my stock until noon. But on the way back, it suddenly occurred to me how naїve I had been. Would the multibillion-dollar industry allow for high-resolution TVs to put them out of business or to put them at a disadvantage? I rushed home, through red lights, and ignored May and Selma. By the time I had logged on, it was too late. Zenith had not gotten approval, and the stock crashed. My thirty thousand had turned into five thousand in a couple of hours.
In dismay, I sold my whole position. The stock bounced to ten thousand on a rumor that it would get approval after all. I bought back, and the stock fell again just as my wife shouted at me to clear off the lines. So now I had lost more than thirty thousand, and I was so distraught that I couldn’t worry about Tina and Miro. I was so stunned that I couldn’t talk about it to May, and she screamed at me that I was a cold beast not to be out looking for our daughter.
The whole day passed, and not a word from them.
Did he kidnap her? Did he want ransom? How much would he want? Bastard, that’s probably what he’s up to, I thought. The gall of it! First he distracts me so I lose money, and then he’ll want money from me.
We kept calling the police. We waited in trepidation all night, all of us, dreading the phone ringing. What if we got a report that he’d killed her? That they were both dead in a big car crash?
But there was no call. There was an email from Tina, however. She said, Sorry Mom and Dad, Miro and I fell in love and we could not help it. He’s such a wonderful man, and we have so much in common. Maybe we’ll be back in a month, but maybe not, maybe in a year, who knows? We are incredibly happy, and we love you all. Miro wrote something in Bosnian to his family. Selma was devastated. We all were, except for the boy, who did not seem to care.
I wish I could go on and say exactly what happened, but this brings us up to date. Where are they? What to do next? Go on the road? Distract myself by investing in Cisco? I have no idea. I am going out of my mind. When this is all over, I swear, no more generosity. Not from me. Well, maybe I’d donate to the military. I have just put 20K into Raytheon. I think considering our love of bombing, the missile producer will triple in value if we get another war…no ifs, only whens. This time, I’d like an honest, old-fashioned war. An invasion of the Balkans would be good. Tony Blair is suggesting it now, during the Kosovo crisis, and I’d say, let’s do it, but not in order to help anybody.
Everything is evaporating—my family, my money. And it’s early April. Tax time. Both fool and tax time. Only fools pay taxes anyway. Why should I pay any taxes? I have paid more than enough.
A TASTE OF THE SEA
NEAR MY HOMETOWN there was no large surface of water. We were surrounded by forests; wherever you turned it was green, but there were not even any small rivers to give you refreshment.
One summer, our father announced he would take our whole family to the seacoast, my ten-year-old sister, eight-year-old brother, and six-year-old me. We boarded the old grey Mercedes coupe of my father, an old beat-up ambulance, which he had bought after it stalled on the way to the hospital, with him as the emergency patient in a kidney-stone crisis. Our father hadn’t even scraped the red cross from the windows; he said it helped in traffic, and you couldn’t see much out of the car because the windows were not transparent, except in the front. Still, in the paint there were cracks through which I stared at revolving fields as I sat on the little sideways paramedic’s seat.
After Zagreb, in the mountains, the engine was overheated. We made frequent stops to fill the engine with water, but to no avail, the car smoked like a steam engine. And then, in a steep town with tall firs and large vistas, and cool air, the car would not move, completely stalled. As failed nomads, we abandoned all hope of reaching the sea or home, and I suggested that we settle right there in the town, because I hadn’t seen a more beautiful one yet; the mountains were taller than around our town, so the town was bound to be better. My mother bopped me on the head to shut me up, while our father spoke beneath his bristly moustache in a highly unbiblical vernacular and tried to fit a new part into the engine, a part which looked like a heart with a bunch of black veins and white arteries branching out of it. When the sky changed from purple to indigo, our father managed to turn the engine on by rotating a hook which was stuck in the engine, and white smoke came out in the back. I crawled on all fours to smell it, because there is nothing more intoxicating than gasoline exhaust, the smell of progress itself. We went on, up a sinuous road, past waterfalls and scraggly ever
green trees. At midnight we were atop a bare mountain, gazing into the distance. “The mountain is bare because the Venetians cut down all the trees, so the wind and rain washed off all the soil; and Venice is down there, over the sea, on the other side, floating on rotting wood,” said our father.
“Where’s the sea?” I asked.
“Down there. If it were daytime, we could probably see it.”
We drove down serpentine roads, and I fell asleep. We reached the coast and I was still asleep, and it turned out I was not the only one. All of us were, including the driver, our father. We were woken when the car hit a hanging tree branch at a precipice. My father quickly stopped the car. We all got out and stared down the precipice. The drop ended in the blackness of the sea, and roaring waves crashed against the rocks. “Wow, we could have been dead,” I was shouting. “That’s exciting!”
I was amazed that our father had lapsed, made an error, for I had considered him infallible. Father said, “God saved us. He let that olive tree branch hang low, so it would hit the car and wake me up before I drove over the edge.”
“Really?” I asked. “He saw our car and bent the tree in a couple of seconds so we’d hit it?”
When we reached the sea’s level, I begged, “Let’s stop, I want to see whether it’s salty.”
“It is. Be patient till we reach Zadar.”
But I insisted, and my brother and sister joined in. I had not believed that the sea was salty, because where would they get so much salt? When it was thought that the Russians were about to occupy Yugoslavia, we couldn’t even get a kilo of salt in the shops, so how could there be enough salt for the whole sea?
Our father did stop. We took off our shoes as if about to step on a holy carpet, and together we walked into the water. I caught some water into my palms and drank it. “Wow, it is, it is!” I shouted. In the black distance of the ocean there were lights of fishing boats. A cool breeze came from the water, the waves crept up the sand, and hissed or rather whispered and murmured like a huge yet benevolent monster.
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