She wondered for a moment whether the name he’d given was his first name or surname, and then decided to respond:
“Nora,” and shook his hand with a nod, and her hand was already at his lips. She quickly pulled it back, slipping it under the table.
“Godnar?” she asked. “An unusual name.”
He concurred with a slight bow, and then explained.
“It’s my artistic nom de plume, Grozdan Godnar.”
“I see,” she said, and struggled not to laugh.
“It comes from two words.” After every sentence he gave a dramatic pause. “God, and Narcissus, and I’ll only tell you my real name the second time we meet.” She thought she saw him wink.
“Right,” said Nora. “And what sort of art do you practice?”
“I am a poet,” he declared, exalted.
“From around here?” she asked.
“Indeed. Although I haven’t been living here for some time, so to speak. Tonight I’m presenting a volume of my poems, dedicated to my native city, so if you aren’t busy elsewhere, I will be so bold as to invite you to my reading from Elegy for a City. You look like a poetry lover.” After the remark, founded on nothing, he fished a book out of his briefcase. The cover design was remarkably ugly: his face. When he showed her the foreword, written by Peter Handke, things fell into place for Nora, though she was no poetry aficionado. She remembered that Handke was known as an outspoken supporter of Serbs, so this Godnar fellow must be a member of the city’s expatriate Serbian community. During their aimless and even bizarre conversation, she did whatever she could to steer him toward what was currently going on in the city, but this soon proved nearly impossible, as the poet spoke of nothing but himself and his philosophical take on the world. He treated her to a few lines of verse from his collection in which celestial motifs followed one after another; the patriarch as glorious transgressor, alchemy as the cross and the poetic subject who was crucified every day in the labyrinthine circle . . . Before the end of lunch, when she asked him whether he’d heard of the case of the teenage lover, the schoolteacher, and her murdered husband, he presented his theory:
“Ah, all the murders . . . you know . . .” He shook his head with resignation. “Our entire population lives, flounders, and dies in their grim Slavic legacy. And when the passions of love light up this little life, it must drown here in blood! And then everyone wants to know: Who’s to blame? Who’s to blame? But they don’t realize that a night of spectral will has descended upon them . . . Why, those very words appear in the title of one of my poems, one of the finer ones, actually. This city experienced the fate of a lost lamb facing a horde of ravenous wolves . . . And that, too, arises in my poems.”
“Ah, yes,” was all that Nora had to add to the man’s lyric excess, glancing at her watch. “Sorry, but I must get going; I have a meeting.” She tried to bring the lunch to an end while checking her cell phone, just as a text message flashed on the screen from Brigita Arsovska: I won’t be able to make it today . . . Tomorrow at the earliest. Greetings.
“One more thing I must tell you . . . You probably wondered whether this was pure happenstance that I came and sat at your table. It was not. You know, today is my wedding anniversary, and you remind me irresistibly of my wife—in her younger years, of course.”
“Please convey my warm regards to your wife,” she replied as she stood up from the table. She needed fresh air, exercise; she had accomplished almost nothing.
4.
Years of lead
a thousand years
open the door
unbuckle me
before (spring 2010)
“Scat, scat, children, Satan’s coming!” hollered Granny Anđa, shooing the children off the road and into the front yard. Never before had she seen a man with dark skin, though her Herzegovina relatives working in Germany, when they came back for the holidays, told of all sorts of men, and women, too, who walked freely about the streets, dark- or sallow-skinned, tattooed, alone or in couples, black and white together. Josip crouched by the wrought-iron gate, hiding behind his granny’s skirts, and when Satan himself, in a hat and long leather coat, walked by their house, Josip darted out and threw a stone at him, striking the man in the ankle. His granny shouted, “You little devil, Josip, git ye back in here!” and the dust-smeared children who had run up from the depths of the yard hollered: “Yaaaaa!”
Satan turned only once, already inured to slights during his brief stay in the Vojvodina village in northern Serbia, and looked with sadness into the eyes of the little boy who’d cast the stone. The child glared back at him, unblinking, defiant, and in the boy’s eyes there was nothing but an unchecked desire for destruction. Josip Ilinčić had been brought to Plavna, Vojvodina, on a special resettlement train when he was but a tiny bundle, in the company of his granny Anđa and his mother, Iva, only ten years after the end of World War II. His father stayed to work in Germany, and as soon as Josip finished eighth grade he was sent off to a seminary in Herzegovina, where his uncle lived. He was the middle child of a brood of five, bright and with no strong bonds to anyone, cold, incisive, with a future as a friar. One summer when he was just over eighteen, about to make his commitment to the life that had been chosen for him, he came home to visit his mother, grandmother, and younger sisters. At a village church fair he caught sight of Mariška, all flashing black eyes and pink cheeks. At night—after breathing in her boots, after gazing at her tanned neck and string
