“I’m standing there by the reception desk when I hear a man caterwauling: he’ll fuck their mothers, slit their throats, the shits . . . you know the routine . . .” Here she stopped.
“Oh, I do,” answered Kristina, wanting to spare both of them the repetition.
“And only then did I see it was him. He wouldn’t even let them help him walk, and he couldn’t walk, he kept jerking free. And then he saw me and suddenly stopped in his tracks, went all quiet, looked over at me, and said, ‘Gee, Ceca, sorry; I didn’t mean you.’”
“What an asshole,” said Kristina through clenched teeth.
“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” said Svetlana.
“Next time they should just leave him out on the street.” Kristina snorted.
“Well, what can you do . . . This trouble is bad. What the hell are they after with the signs and the Cyrillic; they’re driving people crazy. Who the fuck cares which alphabet they use on my pink slip.”
“Thanks, Svetlana.” Kristina was tired and needed time to herself. She’d had it. The harassment at school, Ante’s shenanigans—the insults and the drinking. She glanced from the balcony into the gloom of the apartment where his body lay sprawled out on the bed. She wished he’d never move again. That was two nights ago. As of yesterday, she’d called in sick. Because of the troubles at school. Now she was in bed, feigning sleep, hoping he’d leave her in peace and quiet. Maybe everything would be different if they’d had kids, but they didn’t. Maybe it would have been different if her father’s grave were out there somewhere, but it wasn’t. He had left at the very start of the war and never came back. Kristina was mature enough to understand that her parents didn’t love each other, and somewhere deep inside her she knew this was the real reason he left. The fact that his leaving just so happened to coincide with the outbreak of war, that he was a Serb, that she and her mother ended up in refugee accommodations in a tourist hotel on the Adriatic coast, that he was pronounced dead and later rumors reached them that he’d been seen in Belgrade—these things were nobody’s fault, least of all hers. Maybe things between her and Ante would have been at least a little different if there hadn’t been all those people talking behind his back, ignoring his war medals, whispering about what went on while he was an internee at the prison camp. Everything had come to a head, and life with him was unbearable. The only thing Kristina enjoyed was her job, her escape valve, and now that, too, was crumbling. She noticed Ante had begun tormenting her less; he seemed almost approving of the troubles she was having at school after what she’d written on Facebook. But nothing she did could ever fully convince him she could be trusted.
She didn’t have the strength to get up out of bed, not even after he’d slammed the door, not even after he came back and rang the doorbell loud and long. Must have forgotten something. After he buzzed the third time she finally pulled on her bathrobe and shouted:
“Here! Coming!”
She unlocked the door without checking through the peephole first to see who was out there, and then she was astonished. It was Dejan standing in the doorway. Fumbling, head bowed, backpack on back, he said, softly:
“Hey there . . .”
“Dejan, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you in school?” She could make no sense of this.
“I came to see how you’re doing.” He stared at the floor.
“Well, don’t stand out there, come in.” She took him into the dining room and pulled a chair out for him to sit at the table.
“I’ll be with you in a minute; have a seat.” Then she went into the bathroom and swiftly grabbed jeans and a T-shirt from the laundry basket. She tied her hair back in a ponytail, bent over the sink, and splashed her face with cold water. She glanced quickly at herself in the mirror, at her puffy eyes and a few lines on her face from her pillow. When she returned to the dining room, he was still hunched over in the chair, his schoolbag on his lap.
“Who’ll write the note excusing your absence today? You shouldn’t have come,” she sighed and turned towards the kitchen, taking her coffee pot out of the cupboard.
“I’m so sorry about this mess,” he said softly. Dejan knew that his mother, who was active on social media, was behind the attack on Kristina. She was relentless in her pursuit of Croats she saw as her enemies, always with the same fervor, seeking them near and far, but until now she hadn’t stooped this low.
“Not your fault,” said Kristina, her back turned. This child in her kitchen was no longer a child. He was on the verge of manhood, and he understood everything. She wondered how it was that he was so mature, considering where he was from, though in her thirty-four years, she’d gradually come to see that people are sometimes simply people. No matter which wringer you put them through. And he’d been exposed to good
