She got up, cracked opened the door for Dejan, and without a word went back to the sofa. Dejan followed her, looking at her back, too far behind her to reach out and touch her. She lay back down right away, closing her eyes. He lay down next to her and began kissing her eyelids. She was still warm from sleep and very pale. He lifted her T-shirt, nuzzling into her stomach, and pulled it over his head. He heard nothing but the rustle of the cloth and his heart; he didn’t hear the front door opening, instead he suddenly felt Kristina’s convulsive jerk and a knee to the throat which knocked the air clear out of him. Only then did he hear the scream and feel a powerful blow to the back of his head, and then somebody grabbed him by the hair, almost lifting him up from the bed. He fell between the sofa and the sideboard, gasping for air.
“You deranged whore!” howled Ante, moving toward Kristina, lunging to smack her in the face. Kristina ducked, leaped over the armchair and side table and escaped into the hallway. Meanwhile Dejan pulled himself together and straightened up. He was ready for anything. Ante turned to him; his hands were huge, his face red, his mouth foaming. He grabbed Dejan by the neck and smashed his head into the wall.
“Call the police!” shouted Dejan, but a deafening roar at that moment sliced through his yell, and Ante slumped to the floor. He could see Kristina standing in the hall, pistol in hand, phantomlike, her face stripped of all expression. Ante was still for a few seconds, and then began wheezing. Kristina’s face fractured and crumbled into a thousand pieces. Dejan stepped over Ante and took the pistol from her hand. He would not let her go into this abyss alone; he aimed at the body on the floor and fired twice more. After a time, Ante’s face went slack, his forehead and cheeks finally realigned, and Dejan, standing over him, stared, horrified, as he saw his own chin, lips, and forehead surface in Ante’s features; seeing Ante’s face was like seeing himself, asleep, in a mirror.
10.
Time to cleanse
time to cleanse
time to cleanse
time to cleanse
now (fall 2010)
“Hello?”
“I need you.”
“How long has it been?”
“Twenty-three months.”
“I’m not up for this anymore, Brigita.”
“I’ll never call you again. Name your price.”
“Somebody important?”
“He’s out to destroy me.”
“Fine; we should meet.”
“Wherever you say, I’ll be there. I need you today.”
Part Two: This Is the Country for Us
11.
Eyes the color of honey
your lips on me
your hands on me
I grip a knife between my teeth
shape-changing like an otter
strapping saber to thigh
now (fall 2010)
No lights were on; the windows were like black holes in the shabby hotel. He stared at them so long they seemed to be spilling and swelling, brimming over. Nora’s room faced the water and a sandy midriver island that couldn’t be seen in the dark. If she ever turned on the light. The volume of water—sluicing through the riverbed at a pace that only seemed to be slow—was not easy to see, but it could be sensed. Marko stood there for a time out in front of the hotel, and then, after a pause, headed for his apartment, turning to look away from the water. Back at the beginning, years ago now, when the war felt like a movie and a huge adventure, one of the early mornings when the mist over the river was milky and at its most dense, he gazed out over this stretch of water on his way home from sentry duty and stopped to wonder who’d been logging so much lumber and how was it possible that all the logs were floating down the river, en masse, like that. The scene drew him, and down he went along the quay to take a closer look. The logs were moving slowly enough for him to see that they were clothed in ripped T-shirts and pants, around some of them swirled tubelike ribbons of dangling white intestines that, floating, bumped, tangled, met and pulled apart, as if rehearsing a synchronized dance number. All these were men, big, brawny, but lifeless. Ever since then he didn’t swim in the Danube anymore, even though the summer before the war he’d been one of the boys who felt compelled to swim across it at the end of the school year. He’d felt the river was a part of him; he identified with it, gulped it down, let it sweep him along, lost himself in the river’s depths. While he was a boy, Uncle Jovica, whose house looked out over the same courtyard as his did, took him fishing, only him of all the kids in the neighborhood. All because Marko had the patience for it; he could sit for hours in silence and keep track of the minute shifts in the nature around him and never be bored; he found the river far more engrossing than snapping the tails off of lizards. Marko’s father had died young, collapsed in the garden while picking cherries. Bees swarmed his face, covered his eyes; he lay in the grass, his mouth slightly open, his head flung back, the cloud of bees guzzling the sweet juice until the seven-year-old boy came out to summon him to dinner. The autopsy showed he’d had a heart defect, a minor thickening of the cardiac muscle that had waited until that summer afternoon to reshape their lives. Marko’s mother was warned at the time that the defect was congenital and she should take the boy to see a doctor. His short
