“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. But 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
