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  We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day

  IVANA BODROŽIĆ

  Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

  Seven Stories Press

  New York • Oakland

  Copyright © 2016 by Ivana Bodrožić

  English translation © 2021 by Ellen Elias-Bursać

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

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  College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press books. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com, or fax request on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Simić Bodrožić, Ivana, 1982- author. | Elias-Bursać, Ellen,

  translator.

  Title: We trade our night for someone else’s day / Ivana Bodrožić ;

  [translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać].

  Other titles: Rupa. English

  Description: New York, NY : Seven Stories Press, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020044885 (print) | LCCN 2020044886 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781644210482 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781644210499 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Vukovar (Croatia)--Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PG1620.29.I44 R8713 2021 (print) | LCC PG1620.29.I44

  (ebook) | DDC 891.8/336--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044885

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044886

  Contents

  Part One: Hole

  I. Hands

  2. Someone’s watching us

  3. Moving toward

  4. Years of lead

  5. Be alone on the street

  6. She and he and he and I

  7. Money in hands

  8. Into darkness we run

  9. A few years for us

  10. Time to cleanse

  Part Two: This Is the Country for Us

  11. Eyes the color of honey

  12. Cold

  13. The first and the last day

  14. Garden

  15. Hunger

  16. People from the cities

  17. The ghetto

  18. Room

  19. Hey, Mama

  20. Synchro

  21. Dum dum

  22. Weary

  23. This is the country for us

  Translator’s Note

  About the Author

  Part One: Hole

  1.

  Hands

  finger a fold on the silken skirt

  let the fingernail rip to pain

  now (fall 2010)

  “The worst part is realizing you can’t open the door from the inside,” was the first thing she said. Then she fixed her gaze on the gray linoleum floor and spent a long time picking at the cuticle around her fingernail, her skinned elbows propped on the school desk. On her left pinkie and ring finger she was still wearing fake nails, so she hadn’t been there long. There were moments when the look on her face was bemused, as if she’d surfaced, mystified, from another time, but this quickly faded to stiffness and a dull gaze. Nora had no idea how to kickstart the conversation, and even less how to get close to her after all the salacious, tragic, twisted stories of pedophilia the papers had been printing about her for weeks. She hadn’t expected her to look like this—a shapely blonde with light eyes in the Požega prison visitors’ lounge. Nora would have trusted this woman to look after her child—if she’d had a child—without a second thought while she ran an errand. She’d spent hours poring over the photos peddled to the tabloids by shocked relatives and people who until recently had been this woman’s friends: a snapshot of her wrapped in a sarong, out with her husband at the river island beach, squinting into the sun and grinning at the person behind the camera; then another shot of her, head bowed, wearing a jacket with sleeves reaching down below her wrists, being escorted out of the building while the old ladies peered out of their windows, their elbows planted on brightly colored cushions; and, finally, a third one of her standing, contrite, in the modest courtroom of the county court. In this last picture, published on the front page the previous week, Nora thought she saw (had she merely imagined this?) a jeer playing around the woman’s tightly pressed lips. “This dragon-lady story is the sort of plum you don’t get every day,” said the editor of the paper as he urged her to take on the job, but somewhere beneath his coercive, wheedling veneer she sniffed the sleaze of the system in which she lived and worked. The editor supported her male colleagues without a blink, and he spoke to them, even when they were junior to her, with courtesy and respect, while whenever anybody dropped by the office he dispatched Nora to fetch the coffees, even though she was better educated and more competent than the men. He occasionally spoke with admiration for the slick criminals in politics and others who boasted of their reputations as war criminals while they strutted around, flashing their folksy charm. He thought they were badass, even if he didn’t share their politics. This made Nora sick. She’d rather be writing about other things; she ached to have a go at the people at the top, to expose the system, which stank like a fish from the head. She would have preferred to keep away from this desperate-housewives woman who’d snapped and murdered her husband. Nora was vying with a colleague to dig up dirt on the mayor of the city, who had offered to bribe a city councillor from the opposition party; the councillor had recorded their conversation and made the recording public. But instead, Nora was assigned the desperate housewife. Everybody already knew the facts—they’d been chewed over in several dailies. K. G.—a teacher at the city’s general and vocational high school—had hooked up with, or possibly seduced, D. V., a seventeen-year-old student. After they’d been together a few months, the teacher talked the boy into killing her husband. Three shots to the chest and head, pools of blood; the neighbors heard the screams. True love is so poignant. At first the alibi was a break-in, then self-defense, but soon the lovers confessed. There was no conclusive proof that he’d pulled the trigger, so the boy was released from jail on the condition that he be committed to a mental health institution for many years. K. G. made no comment—and now she couldn’t open the door from the inside. It appeared to be the logical outcome.

  “I’m not recording this; I’ve come to see you, and, as you probably know, I’m a reporter; I’d like to hear your side of the story, that’s all,” Nora blurted out.

  “Are you married?” Kristina asked, her voice tired, never looking up from her nails.

  Nora paused, weighing whether to marry herself off on the spot to keep the conversation going, but instead she opted for sincerity. “No, I’m not. I was with someone, but”—then she broke off, midsentence, wondering what it was about this woman that she’d nearly begun to confide in her about her own life.

  “What point is there, then, in telling you?”

  “Well, I don’t know. How did it all begin?” She pushed on, knowing this was her only chance.

  “How did what begin?” Kristina laughed and shook her head. Nora could see that once something like this has happened, the person to whom it happened no longer speaks the same language other people speak. One of the two women talking in the lounge was behind bars, while the other was free and independent. B
ut Kristina had nothing left to lose, so she could allow herself everything, while Nora still had everything to lose: the interview, her freedom, her job, her resilience, her solitude. Kristina laughed, while Nora kept her mouth shut—and weighed every word spoken to Krstina and everybody else. Somewhere, beneath the surface, this ordinary, banal, and tawdry prison could actually free you. The pressure that rose from Nora’s chest to her throat every evening was released, strangely, by Kristina’s harsh barks of laughter; yes, freed.

  “I wanted Ante dead, I did, I did. Really . . . Ever since we moved back to the city. I had the whole thing down to a science, every evening when he came home and I heard the key in the lock. Whether he was drunk or not—I could tell by how he turned the key. And once it turned, hop to it, girl, God help us. Out of bed with you. It was even worse if I pretended to be sleeping. I jumped as high as the roof without him so much as lifting a finger. Never once in all our fifteen years did he hit me; ha! But it was: dance me a jig! Sing me the anthem; swear, swear to me up and down that you’ve no clue where your father is. Till he dropped off to sleep in my lap before dawn, slobbering, drenched in sweat, a wreck. ‘You’re all I have,’ he’d sob. The motherfucker.” Here Kristina stopped. Here, where she’d only just begun—but the images shimmied before Nora’s eyes, and she couldn’t work out how to keep moving forward with any sort of reasonable question. She didn’t dare take up paper and pencil; all of this had to be committed to memory.

  “So, he abused you?” and after she’d uttered the words she knew this was a mistake; her question was all wrong, way off base and so insulting, even to a woman who’d just been convicted of murder. But she didn’t want to approach the story the same way the right-wing tabloids and Serbian papers had been doing, the way most of the local papers except the official press had done. Their fangs were bared, the blood dribbling down their chins, especially at the news that Kristina was a Croatian-language teacher for students who were ethnic Serbs. She was Croatian, married to a Croat; her husband, Ante, was a war veteran—a war invalid, a former prison-camp internee. Meanwhile, Dejan, her teenage lover, was from a Serbian family, born in the city in 1993, while it was still under Serbian occupation. Dejan’s grandfather was one of the leaders of the Serbian territorial defense, the Chetniks, who scuttled off like cockroaches after Eastern Slavonia—the region they’d occupied by force—was reintegrated peacefully into Croatia three years after the war. When Kristina spoke of her return with Ante to the city after reintegration, she was referring to a time when Dejan was still only six or seven. So what did Ante making her dance a jig and Kristina’s lost father have to do with any of this? In response to her question about abuse, Kristina shot Nora a sharp glance that could easily be read as: Stupid woman, so what if I have all the time in the world? Don’t waste it.

  They stopped speaking. Nora broke out in a cold sweat; she could tell her forehead shone and felt the hairs gluing themselves to her neck. As so many times before, she knew she didn’t have what it took, so she shut her eyes, wondering how much longer things could go on like this. She longed to do right by the story; she couldn’t bear to be one more in the parade of reporters smearing this woman, penning an article and going on with their lives. She often felt that way, to be honest, when faced with almost any story involving people. She didn’t have the stomach to hold her nose and poke at the half-putrid flesh. She had no backbone; she’d pull back just when she should be getting the story. When she reached the point where ideas took precedence over people—the essence of sensationalism—she shut her eyes and took herself off to the Drava riverbanks of her girlhood. Her, her father, her mother. The smell of their gray terrier’s wet fur and the roasting corn, all the river’s shades of August green. Arching over the river, the bridge spanning the two banks, the place where everything stopped. Cut.

  Kristina, her gnawed hangnails caked in blood. Their time was up, and soon Nora would have to stand up and walk out of the Požega women’s correctional facility. The policewoman had already risen from her chair and was pacing nervously back and forth around the room, glancing pointedly at her watch. Nora realized that Kristina wouldn’t be saying much more, that she’d lost all desire to rehash the story.

  “Fine, thanks for your time,” Nora managed to say. “Take care,” she added.

  Kristina looked over at her and then went back, absently, to her nails. She was trying to reattach one of the ones that had come loose, licking it and pressing down hard. This was the last image Nora took away with her. She hoped against hope that this one visit would suffice, that she’d extract a few sturdy, logically grounded facts that would then allow her to get something down on paper and polish the story for style. She hoped she wouldn’t have to venture into the city or, if she did, that she wouldn’t have to linger long, interviewing witnesses. They’d already said everything, anyway; they’d been waiting in line during the investigation to have their say. People like that always knew everything. Of course, from what she’d gleaned in the two hours spent over the torn fingernails, there was a story here, a story about silence and anguish, but this story was of interest to no one else but her, and least of all her editor. Something here was pulling Nora in, however, even more than she’d expected. She jotted down incoherent sentences in her notebook as soon as she left, shut her eyes tight, shook her head, and decided to see when there was a bus leaving Požega for the city that afternoon.

  ÄÄÄ

  Forget this city

  and forget this city

  forget this city

  forget this city

  Many years ago, she’d had a friend in the city. They met poolside, during the summer when they both turned eleven. She remembered how one evening, after a whole day spent together, their shoulders sunburned and eyes red from the chlorine, they’d traded addresses, hugged for a long time in their wet swimsuits, and then, for a few months, they’d written each other regularly. That same last day, a boy had gone missing from the city pool, and this was part of what had kept them close. They remembered him, too, or at least talked each other into believing he’d been swimming with friends right near them. When the pool began to empty out as kids left to go home, Dražen was nowhere to be found. His towel, wristwatch, and gnawed peach pits were still there by the railing. The lifeguards quickly drained the Olympic-size pool, thinking he’d drowned, but no body was found. It was only weeks later, entirely by chance, when the Danube swelled with autumn rains, that a rock slid out from the noose someone had tied around the child’s neck, and the bloated corpse rose to the surface.

  Children began disappearing from the city that summer as never before. Rumors made the rounds about a white van parked out in front of the school and a beautiful woman who sneaked out from the van to entice kids with candy; about people roaming the streets at night dressed in black, seeking children; about the hearts and kidneys they cut from them. The two girls wrote to each other about all these things, crafted their own detective story and believed they were the only ones who could solve the mystery. The last letter Nora wrote her friend was when the war had already begun—about ankle boot–style shoes with inch-high heels she’d bought at the Novska open-air market for five hundred Croatian dinars—but her letter was returned to her, undeliverable. Never again did she hear from her summertime friend, or from the many others she’d known back then, some of them really close friends. As the bus pulled into the station she remembered that her friend’s father had worked at Hotel Danube, the only hotel in town when she was a child. She hoped it was still standing. She knew she wouldn’t be able to find anyone to interview at eight o’clock at night except random passersby, if there was anyone passing by at random. What she needed was a little peace of mind and quiet so she could cobble together a plan for the next day and, if nothing else, identify the relatives and acquaintances who still had doubts from a list she’d been given by colleagues from the other newspapers.

  There was almost nobody at the station; hers was pro
bably the last bus to pull in for the night, bringing Nora and three other passengers. None of them were met. She looked over at the two peeling station benches. A drunk was nodding off on one, cracking open an eye every so often. By Platform One a man suddenly hopped to his feet from the other bench and started walking toward her. He seemed ordinary enough, in jeans and a leather jacket, frowning, maybe in his early forties. He had no obvious reason for approaching her. When he was only two steps away she veered to step around him, with her small suitcase in one hand and a backpack on her back, but he stood in front of her and gave no ground, determined to get her attention. Their eyes met for a second. He was tall and heavyset, his hands in his pockets, blocking her view of the city, which she was comparing mentally with her childhood memories.

  “Taxi,” was all he said, his voice clean and dark.

  “Ah,” sighed Nora, shaking her head, “I’m not going far; thanks.”

  He merely nodded and went on to his car; he’d probably been waiting for the last passengers to disembark. Nora watched him unlock an old white Opel Corsa that had no taxi sign on the roof but, despite rust spots here and there, seemed well enough maintained. He stubbed out his cigarette as he got in, slid the key into the ignition, and shifted into reverse. Only then did it occur to Nora that she could have asked him a few questions.

  Hotel Danube was no longer the only hotel in town, but it was the only one where she knew she’d find a room her editor would pay for. The newer Hotel Lav, just a few hundred feet off, boasted four stars and was on the brink of bankruptcy, much like the rest of Croatia. Government ministers came here for anniversaries, the occasional businessmen showed up, and potential investors dragged themselves all the way to this city at the easternmost edge of the country. The place was a hard sell. Why trek to this inland city on the Danube when they could go to charming Istria, by the sea? Everything here had sunk into a black hole: money, people, hotels, children, initiatives, projects.