We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day

in the middle of the knob. Halfway it went smoothly, and then jammed and took coaxing and jiggling to find just the right balance and open the door. There were two narrow beds in the room, and Nora, fully dressed, her shoes still on, flopped onto the one farther from the door. She lay on her side and stared at the other trimly made cot with its taut sheets. Then she stretched, reached out, and grabbed the pillow and pulled it to her, hugged it and plunged her nose into it. It had no smell at all, spongy, soft, impersonal hotel bedding. Outdoors, the evening was already settling, earlier and earlier these days, and the only sound coming through the wooden window frame was the beating of the wind and sloshing of waves on the broken remnants of a tugboat. The longer she lay in the condensing gloom that filled the room, the more difficult it would be, she knew, to get up and go out again. She lifted her head and switched on the little bedside lamp, but its wan yellow light only made the room feel more airless. She pulled her laptop from her backpack, opened it, and then remembered there was only Wi-Fi in the lobby and the restaurant. She typed a few notes to herself in an open document and then decided to go down to check her email. The hallways of the hotel were filled with a creepy silence; only when she’d moved deeper into the restaurant did she recognize the song coming from the dusty speakers as an Oliver Dragojević evergreen, with him singing, as ever, about boats and the sea. “I swear you look just like Oliver Dragojević,” her mother had told a man who actually was Oliver Dragojević, as her father was so fond of telling their friends while Nora’s mother blushed. And that happened right here, in the late eighties, while parties and concerts were still held on these premises, before the hotel became the headquarters for the new Serbian Krajina government. Nora’s mother was a big fan of Oliver’s, and her father decided to surprise her that night with tickets for his concert, to be held in the city’s big sports arena. They went to Hotel Danube for dinner before the concert, and while they were greeting friends, a man sat at the table next to theirs. Nora’s mother couldn’t take her eyes off him or contain her surprise, and when she saw he’d noticed her, she told him, “I swear you look just like Oliver Dragojević.” The man began to chuckle, along with the others at his table, and Nora’s father whispered to her that the man was, indeed, Oliver Dragojević. At the time she wanted to curl up and die, but later she always enjoyed hearing her husband tell the story. They’d had a wonderful evening, and there was nothing whatsoever to lead them to think that within two or three years’ time that whole life would be gone forever. Nora still enjoyed listening to her father in her thoughts, though the sound of his voice had grown quieter over the years, and the contours of his face were fading for her. Her memories had dwindled to flashes; his big hands, the image of which was still unusually sharp, the shape of his fingernails, the gray shocks of hair at his temples, fishing by the river, his gentle air of patience, rolling down the windows of their red Škoda, a hand raised in greeting. That was the last one. After that she saw his picture on television, the car wreck, the black body bag. The rest of what happened over those days she could only barely remember. Hardly anybody came to see them; there were only the occasional calls late at night that she was terrified to ask about and after which her mother retreated to the bathroom. And then came the real war, which became more and more real like a grimy cloud of dust, blanketing everything. Packing at night, a long trip on a bus, the fragrance of the sea. She allowed the sea fragrance to fill every hole in her memory; she gave up on her Slavonian accent and calling her friends “buds” and chose to tell everyone, instead, that she was from Omiš, so much closer to the coast than her real hometown but—like her hometown—a place refugees were streaming from. She became a Hajduk soccer fan, swam in the sea from May to October; soon she fit right in among the lithe, suntanned Dalmatians and, somehow, survived. Later she attended the university in Zagreb, where life was more bearable, and there she didn’t have to make any special efforts to fit in. Nora from Omiš who goes down to Dalmatia to see her mother. At first, when they’d only just come “down to Dalmatia,” her mother did whatever she could; she even went to the police a few times, hoping against hope that maybe the police stations in different parts of the country weren’t all linked. The inspector—who, the first time around, listened to her story with surprise and interest about how she’d had suspicions that her husband was killed by our side because he went up against them about the war, because he spoke publicly about the crimes happening in Osijek—pretended he’d never seen her before when he ran into her two days later on the street. She went back to the police station that day after he walked right by her, but the staffer at the front desk told her the inspector wasn’t there and wouldn’t be back that day. Not long after that they called her mother from Split and told her to watch out for herself and her daughter; she shouldn’t be putting them at risk. Every few years, with the changes in government, she’d try again, but every time, no matter how she went about it, she’d be faced with the same wall. She was reluctant to burden