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The room was bathed in sunlight. Partly because the blinds were broken, partly because she’d slept well and woken later than she usually did, especially when sleeping in a hotel. As soon as she opened her eyes, the feelings from the night before flooded back. She lay in bed a little longer, and when she realized she was thinking in unexpected detail about Marko’s hands, his nose, and how his jacket smelled, she leaped out of bed and quickly pulled on her clothes, brushing her teeth along the way. She broke into a light sweat at the thought of how much time she’d wasted. She still didn’t even have a full page of copy; she’d been unable to come up with anything up to the point, anything useful. Brigita Arsovska had put off their meeting, and Nora had wasted time at the ludicrous poetry reading and later with Marko. No, that wasn’t wasted time. Her third and last day, she had to wrap this up; there was no chance they’d fork over for another night at her hotel—and this reminded her she ought to call her editor, whose call she’d ignored the day before. It was still early, not yet seven thirty, so she decided to go to breakfast and then at least get her notes in order before she met with the former school principal. She hurried down the stairs and through the dark hallway and came out into the morning light of the nearly empty restaurant.
There he sat, at the same table where he’d been sitting the night before, only now he was freshly shaven and wearing a white shirt. He was leafing through the newspaper, and his cell phones lay on the table, side by side. She could smell the powerful fragrance of his aftershave, which reminded her of teenage boys. She was beginning to feel she was running into such types wherever she turned. The sense of accomplishment and a well-done job among her colleagues was often mere decoration to pretty up archetypal male rivalry. They used Macs and iPhones, but otherwise the mechanisms were unchanged. The worst part of the male principle, the jousting and the pissing contests. Whoever lost had to go to war. She’d been stopped in her tracks the other day by a story on the evening news: veterans who had clashed with police were standing, hemmed in by a cordon, and one of them yelled at the police that they’d be seeing each other soon, and that the war is not over; it’s only beginning! Nobody in the crowd had a retort for this, although some of the veterans were clutching tanks of bottled gas. Observed through the prism of the society where she’d grown up and in which she now lived, the war was actually a shiny, radiant point people kept returning to; they hadn’t moved on from what they still saw as a time of pride and glory. The aggression, destruction, and devastation continued, only now it was no longer about defending the country. Two decades since the war, damaging behavior was still being honored, exalted, treated as if it were holy, bringing with it a death worth hurtling toward before others beat you to it. The worst part of the male principle directly provoked the worst in the female. The action and reaction brought about woman’s inexhaustible thirst for self-sacrifice and service to a destructive patriarchal system. The elderly woman, only half-alive, whom they decorated on patriotic occasions, trotting her out whenever needed, had given four sons for the homeland and was on display as the model mother, though she was never asked whether anybody actually gave their children to the homeland or whether the homeland simply came for them one day and never brought them back. A stubby, crackpot Italian watched from his small Italian town the exhilarating outbreak of war from across the shallows of the Adriatic Sea, and decided, at the age of twenty, to play at being a combatant. Three months later, he ended up at the bottom of a pit with a bullet in his brain and was given a gravel-paved street as an expression of Croatian gratitude: the Italian with a Croatian heart, the
