We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day Read online

  For months there’d been predictions swirling of a rosy future, and rumors of billions scheduled to materialize at any minute from a mysterious Chinese investor for a project known as The Port, the construction of a new canal between the Danube and the Sava riverways. Tales were spun about a tariff-free zone. For several decades now in the port zone—serving both Croatia and Serbia, the two countries the city belonged to—mournful, rusty tugboats had been moored next to towering cranes, which mostly went unused, although the port was one of the few local businesses that was not losing money. Every twenty to thirty years, a bona fide head of state would show up and wave from the deck of the good ship Golubica, deliver the baton for a nationwide annual relay race, declare an end to the war, or offer a formal apology for the latest bloody spree in this oh-so-peaceful place.

  Hotel Danube might have looked shabby that autumn evening, but the price was right. Nora preferred to avoid dwelling on its past, the goings-on during the war, the people who’d stayed there. All she cared about was having a place to sleep so that the next day, as early as possible, she could do her interviews, setting aside all that really interested her to focus on the love story with its tragic denouement.

  2.

  Someone’s watching us

  everything’s not lost

  there’s something I have gained

  before (spring 2010)

  “Tell me, Brigita, what’s worrying you? I am no goldfish granting magic wishes, but there’s plenty I can do.”

  “What can you do? I mean, specifics.”

  “When are you up for reelection?”

  “I am all set for the next three years, as far as that goes. What I want to know is what I’ll get if I endorse you. What you get is obvious enough: four more years, the port . . . But what about me? What about my family friends? I mean, my posse, if I cross the aisle to support you . . . And not just that; you know how they see things.”

  “Fine, Brigita, look: I’ve moved Ante now; he runs that association and has a vote. He won’t cause any more trouble, and when he raises his hand in support, everyone else will follow suit, like dogs peeing in a row. You’re fighting for the city, everyone can see that, and you’re fighting by supporting me, even though I’m across the aisle. Nobody has the right to call you to account—”

  “Sure, sure, we’re all fighting for the same things, but what do I get except a kick in the teeth for colluding with the enemy?”

  “Look, bringing you onto the supervisory board will be a breeze. I’m a member of the port board now, and I’m not compensated. But as soon as I have the election in hand, I’ll withdraw and pass the chair on to you, Brigita. There’s an easy two-thousand-kuna honorarium there. And other tasty opportunities will come your way! When we get to nominations, you’ll move ahead—a seat on the Commission for European Integration; you’ll fly two, three times a month to Brussels. There’ll be other opportunities. Per diems. All the rest. And I should tell you . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Our mutual benefit aside, you’re perfect for it.”

  “Listen, I’m embarrassed to raise this, but I’ve heard people all over town are saying my appointment is a done deal. I find this a little . . . you know . . . It makes me look bad. I thought our arrangements were private.”

  “Brigita, I’ll say this just once. They’re shooting in the dark, wild guesses. You’re a smart cookie. And I, as mayor, say that because unlike other men who may see work with women differently, I adore women, and that’s my problem. . . . I believe friendship functions far better between women and men.”

  “No such thing.”

  “Friends? A man and a woman?”

  “No such thing.”

  “Okay, well, I disagree with you there, but you’re young yet; you’ll figure this out for yourself.”

  “I’ll sleep on your offer and be in touch.”

  “Of course. I look forward to hearing from you.”

  Brigita hung up and switched off her recorder. She got up from the leather desk chair in her high school principal’s office and stood by the window, half-hidden behind the thick, dark-red curtain. There were teenagers in the schoolyard, standing in groups and smoking. They weren’t socializing across the chain-link fence that split the playground in two, and only now and then, when cigarettes passed through the links, did their generational solidarity override the divide. A mere fifteen miles away, neighboring Osijek had none of these problems, but nobody in the city gave a thought anymore to how ridiculous the divisions were. Irritating nonprofit organizations came to visit from time to time, trekking through the elementary and secondary schools; there were associations founded by Scandinavians to promote reconciliation, innovative educational models, studies done of the region, shared classrooms. From the nonprofits Brigita heard sob stories like one about two little boys named David who’d grown up in the same apartment building and loved playing together until they started going to day care, where the playground was split down the middle by a fence into the Serbian and Croatian play areas, so they sat on either side of it for days, playing through the links. She was barely able to push the do-gooders out of her office. The civil associations were oh-so-sensitive, she thought while listening to their whiny presentations about the rights of children and transgenerational trauma. She had not, herself, been keen on the chain-link-fence approach, but if there was no other way, order and discipline had to be maintained.

  Brigita Arsovska had moved to the city from Zagreb not long after the peaceful reintegration, when an opportunity for a position came up in an at-risk school, with all the associated privileges. But even with the benefits package to sweeten the deal, a person had to have a strong stomach for work in the city. It had taken twenty-seven excavators trundling through the streets to clear away the rubble from the ruins of buildings, sometimes mixed with human bones. Her father, a retired officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army, had moved the family to Zagreb from Macedonia. She and her mother and father lived in an apartment in New Zagreb, and their day began early, at 5:00 a.m., with Pavle Arsovski’s hacking coughs. While her mother polished his boots, Brigita served her father breakfast in the early-morning gloom, as she’d done as far back as she could remember. He was always silent, sometimes more aggressive, sometimes less. He demanded submission, discipline, and quiet. And his only daughter often failed to meet these three demands. Her mother noticed very early on that Brigita was wont to steal away and lacked respect for authority, so at least for that she appreciated Pavle’s fierce parenting. When Brigita was in the eighth grade, she’d load her pockets up with eye shadow and eyeliner she’d shoplifted and go out for a walk through the Travno neighborhood. Under her woolen sweater she’d wear a close-fitting T-shirt she’d borrowed from a classmate. Once, her father saw her sitting on a park bench with a group of kids who were guzzling Badel cognac. He said nothing, but she jumped up and walked three steps behind him to their apartment. By the time she reached the elevator she’d already wet herself, and she didn’t go to school for the next five days.

  A few years later, Pavle began coughing harder, louder, more often, until tiny red droplets became an everyday sight on the white bathroom tiles. The cancer advanced quickly; Brigita slept in until 9:00 a.m. the morning after the funeral, waking up more rested than she’d ever felt. The day was sunny. When she came into the little dining room where her mother served breakfast, she met her mother’s lost gaze.

  Brigita wanted everything, but more than anything she wanted money. Good hard cash, full of promise, money that could grant her wishes, money that didn’t discriminate, that forced people’s true nature out in the open; from the bottom of her heart she wanted money. And with it, she wanted fun.

  In 1991, just as the war was breaking out, she enrolled at the Zagreb Teacher Education Academy; she knew she’d need some sort of higher education if she was to live up to her ambitions. That very evening she went right across the st
reet from the academy to the swanky InterContinental hotel. This was one of the many casinos in the capital city with an elite clientele and the requisite massage parlors. Brigita’s plan was to study by day and work as a croupier by night. She landed the job there and then. She was nineteen and a striking beauty with slightly exotic, Grecian features, long black hair, a slender face, and dark, almond-shaped eyes. Her petite, hooked nose only enhanced her charm, and she was quickly put in charge of the tables with the high rollers. She was eloquent, even seductive, and though she didn’t sleep at night and slept only two to three hours during the day, she had the kind of bounce that always gave her an arresting appeal.

  It was only a matter of time before she found herself a boyfriend with a pistol tucked in his belt. Schweppes showed up in her life in 1992. He was the Boss’s sidekick, and five years later, during the flurry of revenge killings among the kingpins of the underworld, Schweppes, who’d surfaced here and there in the war zones, vanished altogether.

  The existence of the criminal network was never proved, and the rest of the gangsters cleaned up their act and forged a legal footing for their businesses. In the corner of the casino with the best view of the tables sat the Boss, whose favorite pastime was smacking croupiers with a baseball bat whenever one of them began to lose. He kept it by the table leg in a gilded umbrella stand. Those first war years were the most exhilarating. Organized crime flourished, hand in hand with the emerging state. The criminal underworld, with the casino as its outlet, rose to the surface with the blessings of the highest echelons of government. The relationship was reciprocal. While the gangsters dressed up as army generals by day, plundered diamonds that had been locked away in safes, and dabbled in matters of state over coffee, the army generals unclasped their medals by night, pulled on their balaclavas, and went underground. Not long after the new powermongers consolidated their positions, bloody clashes erupted, and there was a savage reckoning—for humiliations never forgotten, the festering insult. Blood was the color of the 1990s. What with all the decomposed bodies, holes in heads, sundered limbs—there was nowhere to go. Killing was the only option left.

  ÄÄÄ

  The real world around me

  I reach out

  I touch things

  A soft knock came through the thick office door padded in quilted leather. Brigita quickly slipped the tape recorder into a drawer and sat down at her desk. Professor Kristina Gelo scanned the room to see if the principal was alone.

  “May I?” she asked from the doorway.

  “Come right in. Sit down, please. Is class out?”

  “Yes.” Kristina smiled and dropped her hands with their carefully manicured nails into her lap. “But this high-pressure weather system is more than I can handle. My head’s throbbing; there are no seasons anymore.”

  “You’re so right about that; I never know what to wear,” agreed Brigita, and then she coughed and went on, a little softer but enunciating clearly, “Do you know why I called you in?”

  “I think so.” Kristina rolled her eyes. “I overheard something in class. I began to suspect something was up when four juniors ‘friended’ me.” She gave the quotation-marks gesture with an eye roll.

  “Look.” Brigita handed her a piece of paper that had been on the desk. “A letter came yesterday from the PTA. They’re calling for a meeting, your transfer, an inquiry.”

  “They are out of their minds!” gasped Kristina.

  “Of course they are,” said Brigita. “But you know what this is like. We scramble and patch things together for years, and then something like this nonsense with the municipal signage comes along. You, as their teacher, shouldn’t be making public comments about things. I mean, you’re welcome to entertain whatever opinions you like—I don’t care; we all have opinions. And besides, we all know who’s been up to what around here. But do avoid clashing with students on Facebook. You’ll make problems for yourself, and for all of us, and we don’t need that.”

  “I see.” She paused briefly, and then asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll do what I can to calm them down, for starters . . . and besides, what you wrote wasn’t so bad.”

  “I didn’t comment; all I wrote was—”

  “I know; it was sent to me. ‘The Thompson concert! Be there or be square! And if you don’t come to the concert, watch Channel 3 at home.’ I think the fuss is overblown, but best leave Thompson and his Croatian right-wing extremism out of our classrooms, especially in the context of your Serbian students. So they don’t take what you said as a threat.”

  “A threat?” asked Kristina.

  “Well, that’s how the kids understood it, or so the letter claims.”

  “Oh, come on, please. Who’s behind this? What threat? I’m their champion, and they know it . . . I can’t believe this!” Kristina stuttered.

  “I guess Mrs. Olivera Vujanović is running this particular show; she’s writing the letters and is extremely active in protecting their Serbian identity, as she puts it—scandalized by discrimination and violent attempts to assimilate them into the Croatian community.”

  “Vujanović—ah, I should have known.” Kristina pursed her lips and paled ever so slightly. “Did you see the cake she brought in for School Day?”

  “No, I did not.” This conversation was beginning to fray Brigita’s nerves. Her thoughts were straying far from school and the problems with parents, professors, ethnicities, and singers, like Thompson and Ceca, who toyed with politics.

  “The icing was decorated with the Serbian white eagle and the Only-Unity-Saves-the-Serbs symbol, and then she even posted a picture of the cake to Facebook, like she was saying, This is how we celebrate our School Day, in this, our city, with our Super Serbia cake.”

  “Fine. Let it go, please; that is the worst they can do. From now on, stay away from Facebook and comments. Leave this to me. Listen, I have to go; I have a meeting at two o’clock . . .” She was eager to wrap things up, but she noticed that though she was trying to calm her, Kristina seemed increasingly agitated. Her gaze wandered off, but then it fixed on the sheet of paper and the signature of Mrs. Vujanović, PTA president. A name known far and wide.

  Olivera Vujanović owned several local butcher shops and was patroness of the Serbian saints’ day celebrations, the self-appointed guardian of ethnic identity and the daughter of Predrag Vujanović—who was murdered. He had been one of the commanders of the territorial defense forces, a prominent city butcher before the war, whose refrigerator trucks in mid-autumn of 1991 were crammed, during the siege of the city, with dead Croatian bodies. According to testimony by the witnesses at the Belgrade trial, he’d been a particularly vicious executioner at the Velepromet warehouse and a close former collaborator of Stanko Velimirović, a man who was a city councilman today and leader of the Serbian opposition. Vujanović, Olivera’s father, was one of the commanders of the Begejci camp, through which some five hundred Croatian prisoners passed in 1992, packed into stalls with concrete floors meant for livestock. A thin layer of straw for bedding.

  Though this was not widely known, Olivera came to visit her father several times there, bringing with her in the trunk of her Yugo compact car—the car having been stolen for her from the army as a gift for her twenty-first birthday—a load of booze, cigarettes, ham, and smoked sausages from the attics of the houses Serbs had plundered. In the month after the siege was broken and the city fell to the Serbs, the territorial fighters were in particularly gleeful spirits almost every night, and around midnight they’d come barging into the barn, howling and forcing the Croatian prisoners to stand. In the corner of the barn stood a father in front of his seventeen-year-old son. The trembling shadows in the corners were always the most tantalizing for the guards. They sniffed out the stench of fear, discovered the fragile boy hidden behind his dad. He’s as cute as a girl; come on, old man, look at that ass; pretend he’s your daughter. Tears f
urrowed the man’s face, and the boy’s big brown eyes bugged out like wild chestnuts. Some puked; most had little but bile left to vomit. Some wet themselves. But one of them, Ante, fixed his eyes on a distant point. He was able to turn a blind eye to any crimes as long as he saved his own skin. If they’d only known, the skeletal wraiths around him would have throttled him, but they all thought he was being dragged off for questioning each time he was taken out by the guards. In fact, Ante was occasionally slipped a slice of sausage and a swig of brandy as his reward for informing on his fellow prisoners. He’d sit with the Serbian guards in the room while they played cards and drank. That night as well, they pulled him out and questioned him about who was cozying up to whom. The abuse had now acquired a new dimension, and he answered automatically, grateful for each new question. Olivera served the brandy and arranged the delicacies on a platter. Her careful arrangement of the smoked meats she’d sliced so artfully at an angle seemed pure madness in such a place. She kept sneaking glances at the prisoner while holding the slicing knife, and with a wry grin she went over to him. Knife in hand. He shut his eyes, gulping dried spittle with air, knowing the day would come when he’d pay for all the answers he’d given to the men who were asking. Then he felt the woman’s moist lips on his. The red strawberry of her tongue. He didn’t dare open his eyes. Silence in the room. He felt her hand slipping down between the elastic waistband of his tracksuit and his gaunt belly. She pulled out his dick and sat on it. He sobbed and moved his pelvis; she kissed his cheeks, knife in hand. “I like you,” she whispered in his ear. Then he orgasmed and sank away. She laughed. She pulled up his tracksuit and turned the volume on the transistor back down. The Tiger fighters came back in. “Did you cut it off?” they howled. “There wasn’t much,” she quipped coyly. She came to him another three times, brought cigarettes, warm socks, underwear. Then her father, Predrag, had Ante exchanged, damn him, out of shame that his crazy daughter had the hots for an enemy fighter. The space around him and his warm socks in the barn was now empty. He missed her later and, later, he also wanted to kill her. Olivera spent the next year and a half at her aunt’s in Mladenovac, in Serbia.